A Change in the Wind
by SkItZoFrEaK
Summary: He said it so casually, so off hand. It was like he was stating a fact about the universe. The sky is blue. The cliffs are high. He'll kill you someday.Sakura.Gaara.Temari.Kankurou.
1. Familiar

_The sun beat down on her mercilessly, burning into her body, into her brain and her guts. If she stayed in this sun any longer, it would burn her all the way through, leaving nothing but the charred remains of what had once been a human woman. There would be nothing but bleached bones and a few bits of metal until the desert sand rose and claimed those, too._

_But she couldn't die yet, couldn't let the fire of the sun consume her. She had to reach him first, had to tell him, prove to him that it hadn't all been a lie. _

_She couldn't let it end this way._

Chapter 1  
Familiar

It wasn't raining.

It should have been, but that was the weather for her. On a day like this, it ought to be dumping heavy, drenching buckets of cold, blinding rain. The wind ought to be howling, dark clouds raging, lightening ripping spasmodically in time with bellowing thunder. _Damnit,_ Inner Sakura waved an impotent fist at the sky. _Can't you at least _drizzle_ a little?_

But the sky remained unrepentantly colorless, calm, and dry. It was cloudy, but only enough to cast a remarkable sense of doom and depression on everything, including her. Not that she needed the encouragement. Well, at least it wasn't a nice, sunny, cheerful afternoon, with lovely warm sun and bright colored birds yapping their stupid beaks off. That would have been too much. She shuddered.

Three hours until she left. Maybe a storm would kick up between now and then. Maybe a monumental hurricane would slice its way right through the village, first preventing her departure and then providing her with an excellent excuse to stay and clean things up. _Hah,_ she derided herself. _How quickly we resort to wishing ill on the people we've sworn to protect when it conveniences us._

Ok, so maybe wishing for a natural disaster of epic proportions was a bit . . . extreme. But she was a desperate woman.

"Sakura?"

"Good evening, Lee." She waved a listless hand at her approaching friend. Oh, she was so not in the mood for his perpetual cheer today. And if he so much as mentioned the word springtime, well, she couldn't be held responsible for the consequences, that was all. He moved to her side easily, stretching out lanky legs to catch up and then modifying his stride to match hers. He brought with him the characteristic smell of sweat and dirt and muscles pushed to their limit, but he moved as easily as if he'd done nothing but lay around with Shikamaru all day. Sakura had once found the smell a little, well, gross, but somehow it had evolved into something almost comforting. Familiar, at least. And of course, with her well-trained sensitivity to life forces and auras, she was perhaps more aware than most of the sense of peace and security he all but radiated for several feet around him.

Right now, though, his aura was mildly troubled. "I heard of your mission," he said, after a few moments of silence. "It is a grievous day for Konoha, to lose even temporarily our brightest flower. When do you leave?"

"A few hours," she replied, shrugging. "It's Friday. I'm on my way to the traditional Friday-night-ramen-dinner with Naruto before I leave. It's his turn to buy." _And if he tries to cop out and sweet-talk me into taking this one again, I'll brain him with his own chopsticks,_ she thought darkly. Outwardly, she smiled. "Want to come?"

He grinned. "Of course. Maybe this time I'll be able to convince Naruto that a steady diet of nutrition-less noodles and salted broth is not conducive to a healthy body."

Sakura laughed. "Lee, if you can talk Naruto into giving up his precious ramen, I'll run three hundred laps around Konoha myself."

"An admirable task, my friend, but only if you go a decent speed."

"Of course. I'd let you pace me." She winked at him, knowing that he was playing along with her joke, but also fully aware that if he somehow did manage to talk Naruto into giving up ramen, she would find herself tying on the old running sneakers indeed. He made a fist in the air, eyes blazing.

"Then for the good of your own personal betterment, Sakura, I shall fight with all my heart to win this battle!"

They both laughed then, as they arrived at the old, scarred gates of Konoha and passed through. "Lee, can I ask you a favor?" Sakura asked as they nodded a greeting to the chunin guard.

"Of course," he grinned again. "I am always here when you need me." His smile gleamed. _How does he do that?_ Sakura wondered vaguely. _If he wasn't incapable of chakra molding, I'd swear it was some kind of jutsu._

"I just need someone to check in on my apartment while I'm gone. It sounds like Tsunade-sama expects me to be in the Wind Country for a few days at least – add that to the six days' travel just to get there and back, and I'm pretty sure all my plants will die. I'd ask Naruto, but he tends to…overdo it a bit. And Ino's off training in the mountains or something these last few days. She won't get back until after I leave. Would you mind terribly?"

Of course he didn't mind. That was one of the wonderful things about Lee. Nothing that helped someone else out was beneath him. He was always glad to help, always glad to do anything he could to ease the lives of those around him. No task too menial, too low. She wondered briefly why she never seemed to fall for the nice guys – and abruptly banished that thought to the farthest, darkest corners of her mind.

"Is anyone coming with you, or is it a solo mission?" Lee was asking, one hand flying out to snatch a piece of newspaper that had been caught in the rising wind.

"Just me. Tsunade-sama doesn't want to appear like the Leaf Village is doing anything threatening, or trying to flex muscle. And what's less threatening than a random medic-in-training?"

He frowned, an expression that tended to pull his features a little out of shape. His was a face made for laughing. "Sakura, I wish you were not so self-degrading. You are an excellent ninja in your own right."

"Thanks, Lee. Coming from an exceptional guy like yourself, that means a lot." And it did, in an odd way. She didn't really think that lowly of herself – being Tsunade's apprentice held some measure of pride after all, and meant that there were certain things she was uncannily good at. Her genjutsu were jounin level, and she knew it. Her taijutsu was just slightly above the average level, too, but that was to be expected when Rock Lee and Maito Gai took it into their heads to train with you twice a week. But genjutsu and a good high back-kick alone weren't enough to get her through the grueling elite ninja exams, and her medical training was far, far from over.

_It will just be on hold for a few days. I can use the time to practice chakra storing,_ she told herself. It was one of Tsunade's better tricks, the ability to store large amounts of chakra in a single point of the body for extended periods of time. So far, Sakura hadn't been able to hold any significant amount of chakra in a single point for longer than a few hours.

"Hey, Hey, Sakura-chan, Fuzzy Brows!" A familiar voice rang out into the deepening twilight. "You hungry? It's Ramen Night! Look, I brought Hinata and Kiba, too. It's a party!"

Sakura smiled at the blond head poking out of the ramen stand curtains, and resisted the urge to laugh when a heavy hand grabbed his jacket and dragged him back in. "Shut up, idiot," Kiba's voice growled. "You're embarrassing us, yelling down the street like that."

"Evening, Hinata, Kiba." Sakura smiled brightly. "Hi Naruto."

It was a nice meal, marked by a lengthy lecture from Mr. Protein-shakes and Vegetables Are A Ninja's Best Friend Lee and a steady stream of off the wall comments from Mr. But Ramen Is The Best! Naruto, and punctuated by the occasional loud sigh from Mr. You're Both Obnoxious Morons Kiba. Sakura and Hinata spoke quietly to each other, except for the occasional moment when Sakura felt called upon to bash Naruto one or two across the head for being exceptionally dense. And honestly, his name was _Lee_. Not Fuzzy Brows. It wasn't all that difficult a name to say.

Hinata left first, escorted by Lee, who was slightly disappointed to have failed in his attempts to bring Naruto into the joyous world of nutritious and beneficial food but buoyed by Sakura's sincere thanks for his promise to watch her apartment. Kiba sauntered out soon after, winking irascibly at Sakura and tossing a fake punch at Naruto. He whistled casually as he left, and a white shadow reared up from where Akamaru had been sleeping patiently to follow him into the night. At length, Naruto offered to walk her back home.

They walked the dark streets, moving silently as only shinobi could. "Hey, Sakura-chan, why's Old Lady Tsunade sending you out to the Hidden Sand Village for so long, anyway?" Naruto said at last, and Sakura winced. _So much for silence. _

"Naruto!" She hissed, glancing around. "Do you have to scream out my missions for the whole world to hear?"

"Hey, it's only a B-rank mission, not like its top secret or anything." He paused, eyeing her suspiciously. "Is it?"

"No," she sighed, resigned to the look on his face that said he was curious. And when Uzumaki Naruto was curious, he was a force to be reckoned with. Damn him. "It's just a peacekeeping type of mission. You know, send a Leaf shinobi to hang out with the Sand shinobi, make friends, show that we're all on the same side, exchange a few ritual jutsu with them, and then head on home."

"Exchange jutsu?" Naruto all but choked. "What…why? Isn't that a little…stupid?"

"It's nothing big," she shot back. "They're only ceremonial things. I'm going to give them the secret of fertilizer technique," she smirked. "You know, to help crops grow. I imagine they'll be giving me something to do with sunblocking technique to prevent sunburn. Little non-combatant things. It's an old tradition. And besides – " she inhaled abruptly, cutting herself off. He didn't need to know that. She didn't need to say it aloud in the public street, anyway. Even if the possibility of anyone listening was low.

"Still," Naruto scratched his head, not seeming to notice the sudden break. "It doesn't sound like a great idea to me."

"How do you think I feel?" Sakura responded. "I don't really want to put my medical training on hold to go hang out in the sand playing diplomat." _It's too f-ing hot _here she grumped to herself. _I don't even want to imagine what it must be like in the middle of the bloody desert._

Naruto clapped a friendly hand on her shoulder. "Hey, tell you what, I'll give you my extra water canteen, and you can think of me when you use it to wash the sweat off your body." He leered at her, and braced himself for the expected blow.

She didn't disappoint him. "Pervert!" She yelled. "Stop thinking about me washing anything, or I'll paste you into the cement right here." Calming down, she flipped an errant strand of hair behind her ear. "And anyway I've got a canteen. Thanks for the offer though."

They arrived at her apartment building a few minutes and several more bantering comments later. She walked up to the door, hesitated, and turned around. He stood calmly at the foot of the stairs, watching her. Waiting. He knew what was coming. She considered not asking, considered saying good night and going inside and picking up her pre-packed bag and heading out without another word. But she couldn't do that, and he knew it. They both knew it. She had to say it.

"If you find Sasuke," she whispered, "let me know."

He nodded, flashed her the thumbs up pose he'd picked up from the Beautiful Green Beast of Konoha himself, and gave her the same answer he always gave her. "It's a promise."

* * *

It was a dark and stormy morning. _This is what I get_, Sakura laughed bitterly, _for wishing it would rain last night. _ The evening had stayed merely gloomy until she was about five hours out from the walls of Konoha, five hours away from her nice dry apartment and her warm, comfortable bed. And when she said rain, she meant a bleeding downpour that threatened to blind her, wave upon wave of bone-chilling water that caused her feet to slip threatening on the wet bark of the trees. _Alright, ground it is_, she decided, jumping lightly down and running smoothly across muddy earth. It was slippery here too, but a little chakra on the balls of her feet and some more flowing smoothly into her leg muscles, and she could run all night through the rain without even really thinking about it. She could stop and try to make camp, but she was already soaked, and trying to start a fire with damp wood was just not worth the effort and chakra required. So to stay warm, she ran. It would get her there that much faster, anyway. The sooner she was there, the sooner she could leave. 

_Why does it bother me so much?_ She wondered absently, dodging swaying tree limbs and the occasional deceptively deep mud puddle almost subconsciously. _ It's not like I'm being exiled from my home to go live there. _And it's not like the Hidden Sand village had really been a problem for Konoha for a long time. They were allies, albeit the unease between them had not subsided much since the war. _When you consider the degree of betrayal, _she mused, _four years is not very much time._

There had been a lot of betrayal going around then. Sand had betrayed Leaf, and in turn been betrayed by Sound. The Kazekage turning out to be Orochimaru. Sasuke, leaving.

She winced, but it may have been the sudden deluge of cold water that flooded off a tree down her back as she passed under it.

At this rate, she was going to be grateful to get to the desert. Rain was highly overrated, sometimes.


	2. Stranger in a Strange Land

A/N: Trying to make the Sakura/Inner Sakura thing work more smoothly. Let me know if I got it right this time.

"It's a three day trip."  
"Let's get there in half a day!"  
-Tenten and Rock Lee

**Chapter 2**

**Stranger in a Strange Land**

It took her two days to reach the edge of the forest. She passed through the fringes in an hour or two, as the trees became increasingly scrawnier and further apart until at last they disappeared into wide fields and rolling grass hills. She allowed herself a brief rest in the first flat field she came to, looking back at the shadows of the forest for a while, contemplating how unfamiliar and scary they appeared from the outside. Months later, this moment would flare up in her mind and burn itself into the backs of her eyes, this moment as she looked at a world she had grown up in from the peculiar position of a stranger. But for now, she only sighed, slung her pack back over her shoulders, and headed out into the flat lands.

It took her another night to reach the border shared by the Fire Country and the Wind Country. She could have run over it easily, undetected. After all, it was a vast stretch of land, and as a sign of friendship (and possibly paranoia) neither side kept it heavily guarded. But this was an official diplomatic mission, and doing anything that seemed even remotely covert could potentially throw kinks in the careful planning.

So she spent the extra hour or so finding the Leaf outpost, checking out in the registry with her name, rank, and purpose. The chunin on duty there smiled at her, and offered to let her use the shower in the back of the building. She was dirty, and hadn't bothered to change out of the outfit she'd worn through the rain storm, but she still had a way to go, and getting her spare outfit filthy was pointless. She politely declined, refilled her water bottle and food stock, and made for her last stop before the Hidden Sand village – the Wind country border post.

A Sand chunin eyed her as she entered the building. "Name and business?" he demanded.

She slung her pack to the ground, stretching tired leg muscles. "Haruno Sakura, Leaf Chunin. Diplomatic mission to Village of the Hidden Sand, by order of the Fifth Hokage." She gave him the official mission papers Tsunade had provided, signed and sealed properly. She let him rummage through her bag - _is that necessary?_ she wondered privately - for suspicious packages, weapons other than those she registered in the official log, and anything else that might be considered contraband. _Paranoid much?_ Sakura mused, although her face stayed calm and untroubled. Appearing upset at the search would convince them that she had something to hide.

At length, they finished, and the chunin who was apparently in charge of the post gave her an official pass, a blue arm bad with a simple swirl pattern stitched in. She smiled politely, wrapped it around her forearm, and went her merry way - but not before noticing that the Wind border post had about three times as many chunin and even a few genin than the Leaf post.

She ran all through the night until the green grassland petered into yellowing savannah grass, and then gave way to loose, barren sand. It was cold at night, but the running kept her warm. A few hours after the sun rose, though, she was forced to slow to a walk, and then to stop altogether. It was just too hot. She rigged a small sun shelter from the thin blanket packed in her chunin vest and laid as still as she could under it. In the end, though, there was nothing to do but sip her water bottle sparingly, and perform a cooling-jutsu normally reserved for fever patients. She slept through the hottest parts of the day, and when night fell and the temperature dropped abruptly, she packed up and started to run again. It was warm, and with any luck it would get her there before she had to spend another day lying in unbearable heat dreaming of ice cream and water fountains and tall shady trees.

Luck smiled on her at last, and she saw the ridge of sharp, almost unnatural mountains that she knew encircled the Hidden Sand village by moonset. Another hour brought her within sight of the narrow ravine that lead into the town. At the end of the passage she caught a glimpse of the village buildings: squatting, unadorned brown squares with small round portal windows. Nothing like the colorful, towering buildings of Konoha in their nest of verdant trees and running rivers. It was large, but the buildings were built to survive blasting winds and abrasive sandstorms. Decorative exteriors were wasted here.

By the first pale blush of sunrise, she was at the edge of the first ring of buildings. She paused uncertainly. Sakura knew full well that she had been watched as she made her way down the rocky passage, but no one had hailed or halted her. Maybe her Konoha forehead protector and the blue Wind Country pass on her arm had given her the right to pass unmolested. She was in the village – but now what? There was nothing that looked like an official check in point. Just analogous buildings, hunkered into the side of the mountains. A few shapes flitted silently around them in the early pre-dawn light, but otherwise the place seemed deserted, empty.

The rising heat at her back and feet prompted her to move forward anyway. She couldn't just stand around in the desert all day. There had to be an official building around her somewhere. She set off down one winding street, watching for signs of life. There were few, and those she saw seemed to move quickly away, vanishing into buildings and around corners. _This is starting to creep me out,_ she thought, skin crawling. _Not to mention it's getting hot out here. Doesn't anyone live in this place who can tell me where to find the Kazekage's office? Hell, _Sakura grumped. _Doesn't anybody live here at all?_ She flopped down on a doorstep, feeling an unpleasant sense of defeat. It was definitely getting hot. A trickle of sweat ran down her back, and she started seriously considering setting up her blanket-shelter right here in this doorway, ridiculous as it seemed.

"Bad place for a nap," a feminine voice chuckled directly above her. "You'll get sunstroke."

Sakura jumped to her feet and spun around, hand automatically moving to her kunai holster. But she relaxed almost immediately, recognizing the face. "Temari-san," she bowed politely. _Finally, a human being. I was starting to worry I'd come on some ghost town_. "Where is everyone?" she burst out, swiping at her forehead. The Sand nin shrugged.

"Inside, where it's cool. Only crazy people and shinobi on missions go out in the daytime around here. You came just as everyone was closing up shop and going home."

"I see," Sakura murmured, trying to stand straight and appear more like a shinobi on a mission and less like a crazy person. "I assume you've been observing me since I got here."

"A little before, actually," the blond admitted, jumping lightly down and spreading her oversized fan politely over both their heads to shield them from the intensifying sun. "Come, I'll take you to the Kazekage."

It wasn't far, thankfully. The Kazekage's office was one of the few double-storied buildings in the village, and Sakura entered the surprisingly cool building with a mental sigh of relief. She didn't know what kind of cooling system they had set up here, but it was blissful. Temari folded her fan up expertly and led her up a twisting stairwell to small room at the end of a hallway. "Wait in here," she instructed. "Have a seat. Drink some water," she gestured to a pitcher on the small stone table in the corner."

"Thanks," Sakura headed straight for the pitcher. "Is it always too hot to go outside in the day here?"

"No, it's just summer right now. It gets cooler later in the year. You chose a pretty rough time to visit Sand." Flipping a casual salute, the Sand shinobi sauntered out.

Sakura downed half a glass of the cool, sweet water before catching herself. _You'll get stomach sick,_ the medical nin scolded herself, and forced herself to take small, continuous sips instead to re-hydrate her body at a healthier rate. She refilled her water canteen before taking another glass. _It's always wise to be prepared. _When the pitcher was empty, she went to work emptying the sand from the various cracks and folds of her bag, of her extra outfit, of her kunai holster, even her hair._ Sand everywhere, _she grated mentally. _Fabulous_. When that task was finally, painstakingly completed, she practiced sitting quietly on the floor, legs crossed and hands resting lightly on her thighs.

Half an hour later, she gave it up for pacing. _Damn it!_ Sakura knew she was working herself into a fine old snit, but somehow she suddenly lacked the resources to care much. _How long are they going to make me _wait

"This is ridiculous!" She told the empty water pitcher. The pitcher did not deign to respond, which for some irrational reason only irked her more. She spread her hands at it in aggravation. "How busy could he possibly _be_?"

"Unfortunately, you were not the first of my obligations," a low voice rumbled from behind her, and she dropped her hands, refusing to spin around and stare in horror. Of course he would pick that moment to walk in. She had known it since the moment Tsunade had taken her into her office and handed her the official scrolls – it was just going to be _that_ kind of mission.

Schooling her expression as quickly as she could, she turned calmly to face him, a polite smile halfway formed on her face.

The smile never made it all the way out. Instead, it chose to cower in the corner of her mind, and Sakura felt the urge to do the same as she finally caught sight of him.

She knew that face. It was different, more angular than she remembered, and he was definitely taller than he had been before. The gourd was gone, and the robes were a little different than she recalled. But the eyes that stared at her dispassionately were the same eerie jade, and if that didn't clinch it, the frightening blood red kanji on his forehead left no doubt. Gaara of the Desert, one of the nightmares that occasionally troubled her sleep, stood quietly in the doorway, arms folded, face expressionless, eyes fixed on her.

Tsunade had neglected to mention this little tidbit of information.


	3. Well, That Went Well

A/N: Ah, at last, we get to the real plot - and my biggest challenge: keeping Gaara in character! Worse - keeping Gaara in character through Sakura's eyes. And let's just assume that Sakura didn't know about Gaara's promotion, eh? Let me know if there are any glaring mistakes.

"Very good, Kakashi. That reaction was very 'modern' and it pisses me off!"  
-Maito Gai

**Chapter 3**

**Well, That Went Well**

"Kazekage-sama," she found her voice again, and felt some small measure of pride and shock to hear it so steady. "Greetings. I have been sent by the Fifth Hokage, Tsunade-sama of Konoha" _Oh, Tsunade-sensei, I am going to poison your sake,_ Sakura growled to herself. _You could have _warned_ me. _"I have been sent for the traditional jutsu trade to strengthen our respectable nations." The speech came easier than she expected. Formalities were good. Formalities were familiar.

He nodded, and took the scroll she offered him. There was nothing in his aura to alarm her, but there was nothing to ease her either. He felt like…a void. Nothing. "You'll be given a room."

"Thank you, Kaze-"

"A genin will come for you." he cut her off. "You can clean up. You are not presentable." His eyes raked her once, and under the brief, indifferent scrutiny the extent of her filthy state seemed to hit her all at once. She was dusty, dirty, sweat-encrusted, and probably pale and sickly from her encounter with the heat of the desert. Her hair was a matted mess of pink, her eyes probably had black bags under them (nothing like the darkness that rimmed his own, but that was a thought on which she refused to dwell). And she stank. Oh, she reeked.

_What a lovely representative I make_, she thought bitterly, as she watched him turn his back and glide to the door. _Way to go, Konoha. We're coming across well._ Damnit, this was not exactly how she'd intended to do things. Even so, there was really no call for him to be so brusque, so openly contemptuous. She watched his retreating back, and something in her cracked a little. "Was that necessary?" she demanded rebelliously.

He stopped walking, and turned his head to stare at her from the corner of one eye. "What?" His voice, rough to begin, had a mild edge to it that warned her not to push her luck.

But one can't be an apprentice to a chronic gambler and not pick up a taste for taking the occasional risk as well. The chunin let her scowl come out with all its Inner Sakura glory, and felt the heady rush that accompanied the complete loss of sanity. "You've already made me feel completely uncomfortable and unwelcome by making me sit around and await your leisure after my trip," she snapped, folding her arms. "Was it necessary to further provoke me by insulting my appearance?"

His frown was not as petulant as hers, but for the first time she began to feel an undercurrent of a tension she couldn't quite name in his otherwise empty aura. "I spoke the truth."

"But it was unnecessary," Sakura countered, unyielding. "And on top of that, it was insulting. It's bad enough you treated me like I was beneath your notice."

He stared at her. "You require my acknowledgement?" Sakura had the uneasy sensation that the tension she was picking up in his aura was annoyance, and that it was not a healthy thing to provoke in him. "Why?"

"Well…" the kunoichi titled her head and shrugged in mild frustration. "It's just…common courtesy." _He's probably never heard of it, _she thought privately, watching his forehead smooth again. A hint of a smirk hovered on his face, and though it frightened her it also infuriated her. _Take me seriously, damn it!_

"You are so easily pacified?"

The question threw her a little until she realized what he meant. A little politeness was hardly all she wanted out of life, but . . . "It would be a start." And it would go a long way to soothing the fraying ends of her temper right now. But that was a side note.

"Why do you require acknowledgement?" He asked again. He was definitely smirking then, and the edge of his upper lip curled oh so slightly.

_Time to back off, maybe,_ Sakura noted worriedly, but somehow it was far too late for that. "Why do _you_?" she shot back, and had the momentary satisfaction of seeing the surprise that flickered over his features before the chin lowered, the eyes narrowed, and something that resembled a growl rumbled in the back of his throat for a moment.

Under normal circumstances, she might have been horrified at herself for the enormous breach in protocol, might have been terrified to be deliberately antagonizing a man who had once nearly crushed her to death for the sick pleasure of feeling her blood rain down on him. But this mission had started as a pain, and it had done nothing but go downhill from there. She was tired, hungry, thirsty, gritty, and damn it, what did it take to make people stop treating her like an annoyance?

So she did the unthinkable. She tossed her tangled hair back and glared straight into his visible eyeball. It was a challenge, and he knew it.

He turned his body partially around, and faced her fully. The full impact of his black-rimmed glower pushed against her, and the rational part of her started sending up red flags uneasily. She recalled, perhaps a few minutes too late, something Naruto had told her once about him. Gaara had gone to the hospital after the preliminary matches in her first chunin exam. The Sand shinobi had almost killed Lee as he lay asleep in his bed, and when Naruto had stopped him, he had laughed. Told them that he was going to kill them all for the joy of it, the love of it, and laughed.

This was not a man to be challenged lightly.

He snorted in mild contempt, and she realized that as she had drifted into her memories, she had allowed her eyes to lower. The contempt in Gaara's laugh, though, momentarily pushed back against the memory of Naruto's story. _Damn it to hell._ She was not going to give _that_ easily - although mentally, Sakura was patiently noting that the window was probably the weakest part of the wall, and the stone table might serve as a distracting projectile to slow him long enough for her to throw a blow or two. She planted her feet, put her hands on her hips, and raised one eyebrow. A medical nin is patient, Tsunade had told her. She would wait him out.

The derisive smirk remained firmly in place, but the Leaf shinobi felt the vague tension, the annoyance (if that's what it really was) leave his aura. He felt like a nothingness again, a dark and empty void. She tried not to notice it, nor the hint of…satisfaction?...that flashed in his eyes for the briefest of moments.

He nodded to her, once, and with no further comment vanished into the hall. The satisfied look had thrown her; she wasn't sure why her stupidity should please him in any way. Maybe it hadn't been that, maybe it had merely been a moment of joy as he imagined crushing her into a tiny wad of pulp. But she was still, undeniably, left feeling vaguely triumphant. She had drawn a line in the sand, and though he hadn't crossed it, he had acknowledged it. That was a start.

_I think I may have blown that one nice and thorough_, Sakura commented internally, but the chunin was just too tired to dwell on it right now. _I hope they have showers here,_ she thought wearily, and spent the next five minutes contemplating the joys of personal cleanliness. It was the safest thing she could think about right now.

* * *

A genin did indeed arrive a few minutes later to lead her to a relatively nice room. It wasn't much bigger than the one she had sat in first, but this one at least had a low bed, a small stone table that resembled a desk and a larger portal window that looked out over the village. It didn't open, but she had no reason to want it to. If it came to escape, she could easily smash through, double paned glass or not. There was an enclosed washing space in the corner, and to her relief it had a shower, a basin, and plumbing. Nonetheless, she was careful to wash quickly and efficiently, wasting no more water than she needed. A day in the desert had taught her the value of frugality when it came to the precious liquid.

Clean body, clean hair, clean clothes, and she was already feeling much better. She threw her filthy outfit into the basin, scrubbed those as well as she could, and then left them slung over the towel bar on the wall to dry. There. She considered her options: she could sit here and wait to be fetched at her host's convenience. She could wander randomly around until she found someone and ask to be given a …what? A tour? A task? Another audience with the Sand shinobi she still, on a deep, animal level, feared? Hmm. Option three it is, she decided. Nap time.

Outside, the wind moaned with increasing restlessness around the portal window, and the residents of the Hidden Village of Sand quietly closed up shop. Sand storms were common here, just another part of life. From the looks of it, this one was going to be rough.


	4. Sandstorm

A/N: And now, things get interesting at last. Don't worry, the reasons behind the madness will be uncovered, eventually. In the meantime, I suggest google-ing any weapons that you see in this and following chapters. Also, for those who have asked, I did indeed drop most of the suffixes on the characters' names. I'm not familiar enough with who calls who by which suffix to risk messing it all up. So with the exception of very formal moments, Sakura doesn't bother with -san and -kun and all that other stuff.

"Dynamic Entry!"  
_Crack!_  
-Maito Gai, Jiraya's nose

**Chapter 4  
Sandstorm**

The traditional ceremony was held that evening, and it was scheduled to last about an hour and a half. Sakura stood to the right, scroll in one hand, a red ribbon in the other. Temari, who apparently had volunteered to stand for her people in this one, stood on the left, a scroll on her left hand, a blue ribbon in her right. The actual exchange of scrolls, the formal announcement of their contents (Sand gave them a technique that slowed the dehydration of body tissue), took a few minutes. The two kunoichi tied the ceremonial ribbons in a simple knot in a matter of seconds, and held it up for the assembled crowd, who cheered.

The rest of the time was absorbed by a pompous, tubby man who mounted the dais beside them and launched into the longest, most politically phrased speech she had ever witnessed. Apparently the Wind Feudal lord had decided this was important enough to warrant his attendance, and he spoke with great false enthusiasm, waving his hands emphatically at both the people below him and the Sand ninjas who stood quietly all around him, protecting him.

He seemed to like phrases like "our fellow peoples" and "togetherness" and, her favorite, "despite the troubles of the world." Troubles of the world? Konoha hadn't _had_ troubles with the world until the Sound and the Sand had decided to _make_ trouble for them. _I hope he isn't referring to his own troubles_, Sakura snickered rudely. Despite his rather large girth, he hardly counted as the whole world. _I guess it only makes sense that the Feudal lord of the wind country should be full of hot air_, she thought wryly, and struggled to keep the snort of laughter in. She was standing right behind him, after all.

After the fat politician came a slew of other pompous, self-important men who all more or less took about fifteen minutes to praise the feudal lord, the Sand village, and themselves. A few mentioned how great the Wind Country was. One even gestured to her and said something vague about their "illustrious allies."

Sakura wasn't really paying attention to them at that point. The kunoichi was letting her eyes wander over the crowd as they had been trained to do, noting the brown, rough faces above brown, rough clothes. Blond and brunette seemed to be the common hair colors, but at least half of them had their heads covered with cowls or drapes that hid their faces, too. Her own bright pink hair stood out almost painfully in this setting. And of course, Gaara's blood red mop. But she didn't look at that.

At long, long last, the final speaker came to the dais. He was as different in build from the feudal lord as Konoha was from this desolate place. He was small, wiry, and he wore no elaborate head dress like the Wind Country leader. _I wonder how he keeps it from burning,_ she mused as she eyed his bald pate, noting a few pale looking scars on the back of it. Old scars, childhood injuries no doubt. He wore the long loose white robes that the political powers seemed to favor, and around his waist looped the blue belt of office that marked him as a province governor.

"My people," he stood on the dais and held up his arms as if he were trying to embrace the crowd. By then, the sun was well below the horizon, and the orange glow of the torches encircling the open assembly area danced on his bald head and across the white of his robes. "Today is truly a great day. But the full beauty and importance of this evening, this very moment, has yet to be revealed."

The crowd was shifting uneasily, muttering among themselves at this strange announcement. No, Sakura realized suddenly, and felt her muscles slowly tensing. Only some of them are moving; the ones with the head coverings. They were moving, slowly, carefully, through the crowd, towards the platform where the governor stood.

Sakura flicked her eyes to the left. Temari's frown was no different than her standard scowl, but her fingers were slowly unwinding themselves from the friendship knot that bound their hands together. Sakura swallowed hard, slapped herself inwardly, and began to do the same.

_What's going on?_

"Today is the day," the governor was gesturing widely now, and though she couldn't see his face she could hear the rapture in his voice. "The day when we take back what has been lost to us, what in cruelty and petty greed was snatched from our children, our families, ourselves. Today, we are _free_!"

He bellowed the last word, and the world plunged directly into hell.

Several of the covered men she had noted threw themselves at the dais, the light of the torches overwhelmed by the glow of chakra and various weaponry. Screams erupted in the crowd as several more of them turned on the citizens. They were going to kill the civilians -? Sakura's mind cried out against it, but in the next instant she understood their actions as she saw several Sand shinobi exploding from among the crowd as well. The ground shuddered as the two forces clashed into each other. Temari vanished from her side, and to the left three of the strangers went flying in a sudden concentrated stream of howling wind.

Something huge reared up in front of Sakura, blocking her view. In an instant, she dropped below his incoming fist and delivered a hearty roundhouse kick to the muscular man's knee. It connected, but he managed to move before she could inflict critical damage. His weapon, some sort of staff with heavy carved rock-weights fixed on the ends, whirled at her head. If it contacted, it would splatter her brains in a radius several feet wide. Duck, jump, slide – she danced around him. The weapon made it near impossible to get close enough for another solid hit, and he seemed to be using chakra to magnify the ripples in the surrounding air that it made. That was either a wind or a sound technique, part of her mind noted, and stored that away for further reference.

The rest of her brain was busy assessing the unexpected and precarious situation in which she now found herself. With that staff, moving in close to use taijutsu would be too risky. The few shuriken she chucked at him were brushed aside by the staff's chakra ripples. _Okay,_ she thought. _Mind games it is._ She ducked another blow, threw a kunai at his face and another at his gut a split second later to buy her a few seconds of time, and then made three hasty hand seals.

Her attacker gaped at her as suddenly the ground under her feet seemed to open up and swallow the pink foreigner whole. Before his brain could fully comprehend the situation, a kunai appeared in the air behind it, held by a detached, ghostly hand. The hilt had slammed into the base of his skull an instant before the rest of the arm appeared, and he had slumped in an unconscious heap by the time her body had returned to full visibility.

But there was no time to enjoy her triumph (or feel queasy about the red and grey semi-liquid oozing around the hilt of her kunai). This place had rapidly turned from festival to rabid battle ground. Somewhere near her, a child screamed, high and terrified. She reacted instantly, slamming a fist into the backbone of the shinobi who was preoccupied with slicing open the guts of some Sand nin. The child, a boy maybe three or four, stood frozen as the body of the assailant flew over his head and smacked dully into a wall.

Sakura didn't bother to follow her victim's flight, didn't let herself look at the slaughtered Sand ninja's mutilated body, didn't stop running as she swooped the kid up her arms and made for the edges of the assembly area. Around her, people fell and screamed and leaped over each other, stone and metal and waves of murderous chakra screeched as they scraped and clanged against each other, and blood soaked the packed earth.

_Be calm. Think rationally. Move like a shinobi._

_Move_ - she wrenched her body to the side just in time to avoid the jagged tanto knife that flew threw the space where her heart had been a second before. She didn't have time to look up, to assess the situation, because three more were flying for her face, her heart, her guts, and clutching the child she gathered her legs to leap again –

three dull thunks, and the knives stopped in mid air. The wall of sand that had suddenly risen from the ground obscured her sight, but she heard a scream and a series of tearing cracks, and when the wall dropped, she saw several shredded lumps of flesh that might once have been human. What stood over them, however, may not have ever been so.

Jade eyes bored into her, wide and wild and framed in darkness. Thin lips were stretched back to reveal teeth tainted pink with blood, a maniac's grin. The desire to kill, to destroy, was so thick around him that it choked her. The child in her lap had gone still as death, and she clutched reflexively at the small body, trying pitifully to shield him from the monster that loomed before her. A bark tore itself from his throat, and she realized after a beat that he was laughing. "Are you," Gaara snarled, one hand lifting to smear the blood on his face with a finger, "scared of me?"

She stared at him, heart pounding, chest heaving, fighting the bile that rose in her throat. _Yes!_ She screamed mentally. But if she said it . . . "Are you," she paused before her voice could waver. It could not waver, could not break, or he would know the truth. "Are you going to kill us?" He blinked, and the monstrous grin shrank at the edges. Sakura pushed herself to her feet, holding the little boy tightly to her chest to muffle her racing heart, as if he might somehow hear it. He did not move, and she decided to interpret that the way she wanted. "In that case," she replied, and summoned up every ounce of defiance she had, "No."

Who knows how long they might have stood there staring at each other, locked in a strange fragile moment neither of them seemed willing to break, had the chaos around them not come crashing in. The wall behind him exploded, sending shards of burning brick and plumes of fire at his back, but he was gone instantly. In a whirl of sand and red hair, he had plunged back into the raging battle of the assembly area.

Sakura ran too, turning her back to the melee and sprinting madly for the edge of town. At one point, she noticed a man standing by what looked like a hole in the ground, holding open a steel trapdoor and gesturing wildly to her. Several townsfolk were running towards him, vanishing into the hole as they reached him. "Come on!" He was screaming above the roar of explosions and the crash of falling buildings. Sakura threw an extra burst of speed into her legs, thankful suddenly for the strength she had gained in the weight training Lee had given her.

_Lee,_ she thought almost wistfully as she plunged into the hole, as the man dove in after her, as the steel door slammed shut behind them, sealing them into darkness. Hands reached out to steady her, to take the child, and then to pull her down to huddle amongst the shivering bodies in the gloom of the shelter. _Lee, Naruto, Konoha . . ._

It all seemed very, very far away.


	5. A Friend

This chapter is long. I dare you to make it all the way through. For manga readers, I wrote this after chapters 250 came out. Anything that changes in the manga that I don't acknowledge in here….ah, well.

Words to live by:

"I will _not_ allow you to eat the last potato chip!"

Chapter 5

A Friend

People define time by the rate at which the world changes around them. Years, seasons, days, hours – everything depends on how cold it is, how bright, how colorful, how strong. In the hole there was nothing, and so Sakura found herself in the strange position of being caught out of time, hanging in unchanging darkness. She sat still, and listened to the occasional frightened whispers of people she could not see. She wondered if they were really there at all, or if the darkness had somehow swallowed them and all that remained were the voices. Once or twice she feared that her own body had been swallowed, too, and she tapped at her arms and legs and chest with her fingertips to reassure herself that it was still solid, still there. Once, she might have even slept, but if she did she dreamed of darkness and nothingness, and so it may not have been a dream at all.

It wasn't until the steel door above her groaned open and the dim light of a dying sunset and the heat of the desert came pouring down on her head that she began to wonder how long it had been. A handful of Sand shinobi helped the village people climb out, pulling them up the creaky little staircase. Sakura was one of the last few out, grabbing the offered hands and letting them heave her bodily back into the world of light and air and time.

She moved away from the crowd as they began to disperse into the damaged city, heading for homes and shops and wailing at damage or wondering aloud if any of it had been left standing. She stood silently with her back to the village, staring up past the towering mountains at the last rays of the yellow desert sun, at the red-tinted sky that was slowly being swallowed by the incoming night.

"Are you alright?"

Sakura snapped her head around, hand hovering automatically at her pouch.

"Oh, sorry," the voice answered apologetically. A second later the air to her left wavered, like heat waves rising from the sand, and when it cleared again a man was standing a foot away from her, smiling remorsefully. "Forgot I was still invisible."

The Leaf ninja regarded him carefully. He was a relatively small man, only an inch or two taller than she. His features were plain, his hair and eyes were sandy brown. He was wholly unremarkable, easily forgettable. In a crowd it was unlikely she would ever notice him, and even if he had simply walked up to her she might not have immediately spotted the intruder. But he hadn't just walked up… "That's a good genjutsu," she said at length.

"Thanks," he grinned at her. "I've spent a lot of time perfecting it. You won't believe how handy it can be. Especially when my relatives come to visit." He winked brashly. His pale brown hair was neatly combed, and his clothes were dull brown, nothing garish or bright about them. Nonetheless, she was reminded very strongly of Naruto. He stuck out a hand, interrupting her scrutiny. "I'm Kenji," he said genially. "Chunin of the Hidden Sand Village. You must be the Leaf ambassador."

Sakura shook his hand briefly. "Sakura," she replied, and allowed herself to return the smile.

"It suits you," he grinned again, and dropped her hand. "I saw you at the ceremony, but I was too far off to notice how pretty you really were." Concern replaced flirtation in his brown eyes before she could summon up the energy to blush. "You looked pretty peaked a moment ago, though. We've got some good medical-nins here, if you want."

Sakura shook her head. "I'm fine," she reassured him. "Just a bit disoriented."

"That's to be expected," a new voice answered her. "Considering your recent experience."

Sakura turned away from Kenji to greet Temari as the Sand jounin walked briskly up. "How many days was I down there?" Sakura asked mildly.

"Two," the blonde woman rested a hand on the handle of her fan. "We killed most of the first wave that night, but reinforcements arrived at dawn. It was a bloody one."

"How many waves?"

"Three. The first was the worst though. Gaara killed the traitor governor, but he wasn't even a ninja." Temari looked pointedly at the Sand chunin. Taking the hint, Kenji bowed to her and then to Sakura.

"May we meet again under better circumstances," he murmured to her, giving her another brief smile before turning sharply and striding off towards the milling civilians.

Temari gestured for Sakura to follow as she moved off down the battered streets. "From what we've discovered so far, the governor was the youngest child of a relatively wealthy family. His father left most of the inheritance to his older brothers. Apparently he decided to enter politics after that. He must have found he couldn't get any higher than province governor legally, so he started an insurgent group." She shook her head. "Or he was working directly for someone who did."

"What happened to the feudal lord?"

"Made it out. We had a team of jounin take him directly back to the capital."

Sakura rubbed a hand across her nose distractedly. "It's over then?"

A long silence. "No."

Somehow, she hadn't thought so. It was never that easy. "I'm sorry," she murmured, and meant it. Even so, there was some part of her that felt relieved, calm. It wasn't her war, this time. In fact, it was the perfect excuse. "I'll need to report this to the Fifth," she told the Sand nin. "Should I inform the Kazekage of my departure, or is he too busy right now?"

Temari looked at her for another long moment, and then slowly shook her head. "I'm afraid that isn't possible right now."

"Then I'll have to ask you to tell him for me, at his convenience." Sakura stretched her shoulders. "And I apologize for the rude departure." Actually, it might not be so bad to miss that little ceremony. She hadn't spoken to the Kazekage since her first run-in with the man, and look how well _that_ had worked out. (Yep,) Inner Sakura all but bounced on her heels gleefully. (That's enough sand demon for _this_ little pink kuniochi.) Of course, there was the matter of Tsudane's request, but, well, her sensei would understand.

"Sakura," Temari butted in, pulling Sakura's attention away from drawing a mental map of the route she would take home. "I don't think you quite understand the situation. Wind Country is in complete upheaval – it's not just here. They sent the most ninja here, but aside from the fact that somehow large quantities of foreign shinobi got into the country without being noticed, several key areas have been attacked. Trade routes, armories, political meeting places – it's a mess."

"How big a mess?" Sakura asked quietly, a pit of dread opening in her guts as the implications of that sunk in.

"The insurgents who lived through the first two nights all killed themselves on the third night when it became obvious that we were winning and they were out of reinforcements. We took no prisoners, so we don't know exactly how big their organization is."

"Why are you bothering to explain this to me?"

"I just thought it fair to let you know why you'll be staying as our guest a little longer than you might like."

It was dangerous to push, and not particularly bright. She pushed anyway. "And if I refuse the hospitality…?"

"The borders are closed," Temari folded her arms. "I wouldn't try."

Sakura hesitated, but in the end common sense won out, and she gave in. "Very well. I understand."

* * *

She slept the rest of the day, and woke up an hour or so before sunset. She lay in her bed for a long time, watching the little bit of light that still stubbornly crept under the thick portal covering that provided her enough darkness to sleep when the sun was out. When it had faded, and the faux-darkness had been replaced by the deeper shadows of incoming night, she forced herself to get up. Hiding in her room was not going to help the situation. 

I wish I could request to write home, she thought dully as she brushed her teeth and hair. Just a note to tell them I'm ok. Doubtless they'd heard of the problems here. Just as doubtless, her friends were probably already nagging at the Hokage to allow a rescue mission. Naruto and Lee would be, at least. Maybe Ino, possibly Kiba. It was not a particularly good thing, to think of her friends worried or upset, but on some selfish level it did make her feel a little better. She may be isolated here, but somewhere out there people loved her, cared for her. That helped.

(Damnit, I will not be homesick,) Inner Sakura ranted forcefully. I will employ myself in a productive and meaningful manner, Sakura agreed. I will practice my medical training. I will…"I will not back down," she said aloud, confirming it with herself in the mirror.

Sakura tied her forehead protector firmly around her head. Right. Tonight she would seek out Gaara of the Desert.

* * *

The problem with setting a goal, Sakura reflected as she sat on the rooftop of the Kazekage's office and dangled her feet thoughtfully off the edge, was that it was usually easier said than done. She went to his office, but no one was there. She went through the whole damn building, actually, but all she found were a few shinobi who had been wounded too badly in the recent fight to carry on regular duty but didn't need to be in the hospital. None of them had seen their Kazekage all day. 

She wandered the streets, too, not oblivious to the distrustful glances and the occasional hush that fell when she passed a group of people who had been chattering animatedly a few seconds before. The rational Sakura knew that the animosity was not so much directed at her because she was a Leaf shinobi, but merely because she was unfamiliar, and there was too much in these people's world right now that was unfamiliar and unexplained. No one knew where the enemy had really come from, or why, or how. Possibly Sound ninja, Temari had said. Did that mean…Sasuke? She brushed the thought away.

A couple of hours later, Kenji found her again. She was perched on a few upturned boulders near the cliff walls on the outer edge of town, watching the crowds half heartedly. "Sakura-san," he greeted her, hoping up to stand beside her. "I hope you haven't forgotten me."

She smiled. "No, I didn't. I'm still trying to puzzle out how you got so close to me without my noticing your chakra aura or anything."

Kenji settled himself down, reaching up a hand to brush a strand of hair carefully back in place. Everyone's got their vanity points, Sakura thought with a touch of humor. "Well, I guess you could say subterfuge is really the only thing I'm good at. I was never much of one for direct combat."

"A shinobi needs cunning as the lungs need air," she quoted the old maxim at him mock-sternly.

"Yes, sensei," he chimed back like an obedient child. They both laughed. "I'm trying to get stronger, though. I've been working on this powerful new jutsu. Maybe I'll show it to you someday. In the meantime, may I buy you dinner?" The words rushed nervously out of his mouth, like a teenager asking someone on his first date. Then again, Sakura considered, maybe he was.

"Is there even any restaurants open right now?"

"Oh, there are always restaurants open. The world could be plunged into the bitter depths of hell's darkness and still there'd be some noodle shop offering discount coupons to the damned."

Sakura laughed again, enjoying the sensation of comfort, of easy companionship. It was nice to talk to someone like this again. Granted he wasn't quite as outrageously bright and bouncy and loud as Naruto or Lee, but he was genial enough. The pink kuniochi shrugged mentally. Who said she couldn't at least try to enjoy her forced time here? "Alright."

It was nice, eating noodles and laughing with a friend, even if she didn't know him that well. They didn't talk about anything really all that special, mostly the weather (hot, even now in the evening) and their first chunin exams (there was plenty that she omitted from that tale, but he didn't seem to notice the gaps). "I was hopeless," he told her with a self deprecating laugh, waving his chopsticks. "I tried to take on a Hidden Mist ninja, and all he did was drench me in a wave of really cold water. I was so shocked that I just stood there for a few seconds before he smashed my nose in. It was pretty embarrassing." The Sand nin shrugged. "But then, I was twelve, and I'd never seen that much water in my life, and I'd never been that cold."

"I can see how that would startle you," she nodded, picking at her half empty bowl.

"Look at that outsider shinobi," a voice whispered loudly behind her, cutting into her thoughts and interrupting her next words. She paused, chopsticks halfway to her mouth, listening. "Prancing around like nothing's happened. You'd think she'd have had sense enough to leave."

"Probably gloating over our misfortune," another voice muttered back. Sakura felt her back muscles tighten. "Damn foreigners," the gruff voice added.

Kenji was frowning. "That's not - " he blurted out, but Sakura raised a hand sharply to stop him.

"Thank you for the meal, Kenji-san," she said quietly, smiling her thanks. But she dropped the smile immediately and stood up. He half-rose to follow her, but she put a hand on his arm. "I'm a little tired. I think I'll go get some sleep." He hesitated, and then nodded understandingly.

"Sakura-san, I have a request, before you go." Kenji's voice was suddenly very formal, as if he were addressing a superior.

"Yes?"

Kenji scratched his head, dropping the formality in favor of abashed nervousness that was definitely Naruto-like. Sakura mentally frowned at the vague homesickness that thought conjured up, and focused her attention on her new friend. "Er…well…I just wondered…see, I know you can't leave right now because of all this," he gestured at the torn up street, "so I thought since I'm not particularly busy tomorrow, you might want to have someone to talk to…" He trailed off, obviously not certain how to phrase it. "I can show you around a bit, anyway. Maybe you can help us clean things up – you know, it would make people see that you're on our side."

"That sounds lovely," Sakura put the poor boy out of his misery. He flushed a little, but grinned good naturedly.

"That's great! I'll come find you tomorrow around mid-afternoon when things start to cool down." He bowed to her again, and then took off down the street. "Good night, Sakura-san!"

"Good night."

She walked through the streets calmly, but the citizens of the village were beginning to peter out of their damaged houses in the cool of the evening, and the hastily averted eyes and quiet murmurs that followed her passing did not escape her. At least Kenji didn't seem wary of her. He was a sweet man – and the fact that he reminded her strongly of her two best male friends in Konoha was a point in his favor, too. Nonetheless, he was the one sociable person in a crowd of people determined to fear or at least avoid her. It was a lonely feeling. No wonder Naruto had always been so determined to make people recognize him, or Gaara had been so hateful. If she'd been treated like this all her life, she might just be crazy too.

So now here she was, sitting on the still-warm stone of the Kazekage's office, watching the stars come out and wondering vaguely why they seemed so much brighter here than at home.

Something moved in the dark behind her, and Sakura felt her heart plunge straight down into her guts.

* * *

He'd probably been standing there for several seconds before the skin on the back of her neck prickled in warning. _Stupid_ fool, to let her attention wander. "Kazekage-sama," she said aloud, turning her face towards him. Gaara met her eyes, but made no other response. He just stood there, arms crossed, face expressionless. It was a far cry from the wild monster who had smeared blood across his cheek and laughed at her in the dark. "This your spot?" she gestured to the roof top. 

"You were looking for me."

Right to the point, this man. "You don't miss much, do you?" And though she said it lightly, she knew instinctively that he was indeed watching every move, every twitch, every detail of her face and body language. He was watching for something. It took her a moment to realize what.

Watching for her to flinch.

"What did you want?"

Sakura shrugged, as if his proximity didn't bother her in the least. "I thought I might as well make a few unreasonable demands, seeing as I'm an unwilling prisoner here now and no longer a guest." She grinned.

"If I wish it, you will have no opportunity to bother me." Well, that was certainly true. She hadn't even been able to find him today, when he presumably wasn't actively evading her. But he had come seeking her out, now. At his convenience, of course, but she could forgive him that this time. He _was _Kazekage. But why bother to look for her? Curiosity?

Whatever his reason for being there, he wasn't about to tell her. She was going to have to initiate things if she wanted to get her own job done. "I was just noticing," she began gamely, "how quiet this place is, considering the size of the settlement. Half the buildings seem to be empty." She considered for a moment. "I guess everyone is out hunting down all the information on the uprisings they can. Still, it must be hard on the villagers."

He took the bait. "Why?"

"Because they're left to rebuild everything." Sakura waved a hand at the sprawling village below, encompassing the smashed walls, the torn streets, the collapsed buildings in one sweep of her arm. "A battle they can't really comprehend rips through their homes for reasons they aren't told, and then all the fighters up and vanish, and leave them to put it all back together again. But then," she went on, more to herself than him. "I guess they knew this was a shinobi village when they came here."

He moved to stand next to her, a few feet away and yet somehow a little too close for comfort. Anywhere within a few blocks might be too close for comfort, she thought wryly, but it was stupid to dwell on that. "Knowing what something is and being forced to stare it in the face are two very different things." His face was lowered slightly, making his eyes narrower than they might actually have been.

She glanced at him, but he was still glowering out at the night, arms crossed. "Yes," she murmured. Then, more confidently, "But they knew what a shinobi's life is about, and on some level, they had to expect something like this to happen sooner or later."

"Hearing about something and being confronted with it are different," he insisted flatly. "You can think you know what you're dealing with, but when it's finally in front of you, you find it's completely different from what you thought it would be. But by then," he shrugged. "You're trapped."

That's an odd way to put it, she noted. "I guess that's where nostalgia comes from," she mused aloud. "People who experience something that changes the way they look at the world, and they wish that they could go back to seeing it the way they did before, when they didn't really understand it."

"Do you wish that often?"

She frowned a bit. The question was unexpected, and it jolted her train of thought in a new direction. "No, not really. Nostalgia implies regret, and I like to make it a point not to regret things." Sasuke. Her early treatment of Naruto and Lee. The lost years of Ino's friendship. No. It was better to accept the hard learned lessons of the past, and then put them firmly behind her. "It tends to be easier said than done, though."

"People dislike complications," he noted. There was something vaguely bitter in his voice, something that made her study him from the corners of her eyes warily. "They want things to be easy, simple, like when they were children." He put a slight emphasis on the word "they" which took her a moment to understand. But then, she reasoned, Naruto said he'd been isolated his whole life. Never really a child like the others. Not like them.

She yawned suddenly, startling herself before she remembered to stifle it. "You should sleep." He said quietly, impassively, and with a jolt she remembered what else Naruto had told her about him. He couldn't sleep, or the demon would escape, eating at his soul as it destroyed everything around him. (Well of course, you idiot,) Inner Sakura poked her. (Those dark marks around his eyes aren't there to be decorative, you know.)

"I probably should," she settled on agreeing with him at last. And then, because somehow she couldn't just end it like that, she asked. "How do you do it?" She didn't elaborate, but the way his eyes flickered scornfully to her face and then away again told her that he knew what she meant anyway. She suddenly felt like an inquisitive little child pestering an adult. '_You',_ _Sasuke said, turning to glare at her over his shoulder, 'are really annoying.'_ Gaara turned away so she couldn't see his face anymore. "Good night," she murmured, and headed for the door.

"Are you running away?" He grated. Her hand paused on the door latch, and she looked back over her shoulder at him. Something in his tone told her that it was dangerous to admit that yes, she had indeed been beating a hasty retreat. But what could she say that didn't sound like an excuse?

"That's putting it a bit harsh." She tried for light bravado, praying it didn't ring too false. "Although I do grant your demeanor is a bit obnoxious." She rubbed her nose and gave his back a self-deprecating smile. "But it's more an attempt to leave before I really stick my foot in my mouth. I seem to have the bad habit of talking too much around you."

He shrugged, and some of the tension in the air seemed to diffuse. Had his chakra been building up around them? Was his aura just that powerful? Or was she simply hyper-aware of him? Hah. _That_ was a thought she cut off as quickly as she left the rooftop. Down that path lay dragons, and she was in enough of a mess as it stood.

* * *

_The servant knows better than to look at her master's face. Instead, she keeps her eyes on the sand just before his feet, waiting obediently for him to speak to her._

_"Have they been contacted?"_

_There is only one "they" that he would bother to ask about. Her voice as she answers is as steady as it is meek. "Yes, master. They are interested in your offer. They say they will come to you, but they wish to know if you will let them have the Kazekage too or if you plan to keep that kill to yourself."_

_He does not answer. Perhaps he is thinking the question over. Perhaps he has already forgotten she is there – although that is not likely. He never forgets anything. "Spread the word to our insurgents," he says eventually. "Tell them to keep up the terrorist acts. Anything that keeps him off-balance, and his subordinates scattered across the country."_

_"Yes, master."_

_"There is a new piece on the playing board," her master muses aloud. "I will have to watch her, for awhile. When I know what part she will play, I will make my move." He taps his temple thoughtfully. "What is she to him?" he murmurs._

_Neither his servant nor the desert replies. _


	6. Predictable

AN: Yes, revamped. And after this chapter, taking a sharp plot twist. But we'll get to that. In the meantime: the needlepoint joke is credited to irri of the "Lethal Empathy" community. Beta-ing done by randomsome1 (or, as ff.n would have it "randomsomeone"). I recommend her stories highly. OK, people, here we go again…

"Son, let me tell you something. Men are no good without any women."  
-Nara Shikatou

**Chapter 6**

**Predictable**

Sakura spent the next day sleeping in before Kenji showed up. He had planned to take her around the village, but they were waylaid almost immediately. A few of the buildings on one block had been so badly damaged that they couldn't simply be repaired, but had to be knocked down and completely rebuilt. Sakura was more than willing to contribute to the destruction of the remains. In fact, it was a nice stress reliever. The kunoichi laughed in satisfaction as her fist shattered the remains of a solid stone wall, leaving a pile of rubble in its place. "How did you _do_ that?" Kenji asked, awe in his voice, as she delicately picked a chunk of gravel out of her petal pink hair. She smiled, and shrugged. No need to tell rival shinobi _every_thing, friend or not.

The gratitude of the people she helped for those few hours went a long way for her state of mind. Kenji's flattering admiration did too. The only real dark spot of the day was the quiet inner debate that carried on in the back of her head while she worked and joked with Kenji. Part of her demanded that she avoid the roof, and the man she had met there, for the rest of her enforced time there. Another part of her laughed bitterly at her cowardice and wondered if the years of training under Tsunade had changed her at all.

Her mind warred back and forth between self-doubt and scorn. If she went, it would be uncomfortable, and not only because of the awkward way that she left last night. Gaara was calmer than she remembered, and of course years of separation meant that it was hardly fair to judge his character on the handful of memories she had of him as a twelve year old.

Sakura involuntarily raised a hand to her chest, as if to prove to herself that she could breathe, that nothing was constricting her lungs and her ribs to the point of cracking….

_Stop that_, she ordered herself. She was just being a melodramatic coward. She forced herself to think of other things, to pay attention to the city around her. Learn about the weird customs and habits. Tease Kenji about the self-conscious way he kept patting his hair into place. Admire the delicate blown glasswork. Eat the funny roasted snake meat on a stick - vaguely gross to think about, but once past the strangeness, not too bad. Smile at people but make it a point to flash the official visiting-nin badge whenever someone looked suspicious.

Around moonrise, Kenji was obliged to leave to run a few messages from the Kazekage's office. Sakura, a bit tired from heaving chunks of rock wall around, went back to her guest quarters and slept for awhile. She dreamed of a heavy, bloody claw that flew at her, wrapped itself around her body and crushed her tightly, and a pair of wild eyes that bored into her. The eyes were black, and then red, and the darkness around them chattered like a thousand dying birds. The claws became fingers that smeared the blood on her face as a demon's mad grin lunged for her throat.

Sakura woke around sunset, heart pounding. It took her a few moments to dispel the screeching in her mind, to force herself to breath normally.

The city was coming awake for its second wind. Sounds of people yelling and someone plucking at a stringed instrument of some kind drifted in through the thick windowpane. She could easily go wandering around again, and then come back to her room and maybe sleep some more, or practice some jutsu, or…

Sakura scowled fiercely at herself, clenching her fists in her lap. Had years of study under a legendary Sannin done her nothing? Was she still, deep down inside, the meek and panicky girl who huddled in fright as others faced the danger for her? _No, damn it!_ She'd given in to the anxiety last night, broken off and in effect run away because he made her uncomfortable. True, it would be stupid to treat Gaara lightly, just because he seemed calmer and responsible. But then again, he was older, and in their encounters, he had been the calm one when she had stuttered and flared in irritation…

_(A monstrous laugh, and blood smeared across sand-cracked features.) _

Had she changed at all?

* * *

Sakura willed her shoulders to fall back, as naturally as possible. She forced her breathing to be calm and light, natural. Everything about her body, her posture, her expression, had to show him that she was relaxed, at ease with the screaming unnaturalness of him. To show fear or hate or any sign of discomfort would be dangerous and stupid. "Good evening, Kazekage-sama," she inclined her head. He made no response, but moved to stand beside her, arms crossed and face blank.

"You hide in formality."

She wanted to sigh in frustration. _Well, that didn't take long_. "You hide in aggression," she shot back. She crossed her arms to match his, but kept her eyes on the desert spread out beyond the jagged cliffs. "You seem particularly eager to drive me off tonight."

"You seemed interesting." He shrugged. "At first. But when I returned, you were disappointingly contrite and boring. Why else would I bother with you?"

She started to snort derisively, but checked herself. "I usually try to avoid being rude. But if you prefer, I could easily stand here and insult you some more."

A shrug. "If that's the best you can do."

_Not a challenge_, she thought, eyeing him carefully. _He's not here to fight me, physically or otherwise. Then why the hell…? _Sakura leaned on the low wall that edged the roof, arms still folded. "You're bored." She stated, and allowed herself a grin as he turned an assessing glance at her. "Well, in that case," the grin broadened. "I'm not going anywhere. I think I'll just sit here and try to get on your nerves."

"Why?"

Telling him the truth – that she couldn't think of any other way to talk to him that wouldn't end in another awkward retreat – was not a good idea. She shrugged instead, still smiling. "Well, it isn't like I've got anything else to do."

_You are an idiot, _Inner Sakura told her firmly. _A great big idiot who is just asking to be crushed to death._

Oh well. Too far now. "If insulting you does the job, so be it. If not, I can always just chatter on my own." That might actually be a viable option, she realized even as she said it. It covered the long uncomfortable silences, and it might just get him to talk, if only to shut her up. "I can't help but like the scenery here. It's all so - " she gestured vaguely out. "Vast. No trees, no tall buildings to hem it all in. I know it's not possible, but the stars seem further away here. And it's like there's more of them. If you're high enough to see over the mountains, you would think the sky and the sand beyond them just went on forever."

She hadn't really thought about it before, had just been talking for the sake of filling the air and possibly aggravating him. But now that she considered it, it was true. If she looked out at the endless stretches of sand, she could well imagine that she was hovering on the edge between infinite dark sky and infinite pale sand. The intense…_freedom_ of it all was almost crushing in its own way. She was tiny and insignificant, her entire life a brief flicker across the eternity of this place that had seen a thousand lives like her own, and would see a thousand more when she was gone…

She shuddered just a little, the skin on her arms prickling. She regretted it instantly. _Did he see - ?_

"It unsettles you."

Of course he saw it. Damn him.

She sighed, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms for a second. "Why do you think people have such difficulty facing the concept of eternity?"

"Because it is unknown," he answered instantly, easily. "And they fear the unknown."

His answer made sense – all her life she'd seen many examples of people driven to conquer and control that which they didn't understand. "Why do we waste so much time fearing the unknown?" She murmured, picturing a friendly face with blue eyes and wild blond hair, and a village unanimously turning their backs on it.

"They assume it's dangerous."

"Is that necessarily a bad reaction to have?" Sakura remembered her days at the academy, with Iruka-sensei drilling into them the long list of shinobi rules for conduct both on and off duty. "Sounds like the shinobi rule. You know: 'Always be on your guard.' Or something to that effect."

Another shrug. "It's a survival instinct, because inside most people know that they are frail and weak, and easily killed." He laughed shortly, coldly. "The human body is one of the more inefficient and useless forms found in nature."

"To a point, that's true," she agreed at last, biting her lip thoughtfully. "I mean, name another animal in the world that walks upright without a tail to balance it." She held up a hand against the faint half-moon. "Not much in the way of claws, either. Or fangs." Green eyes flicked pointedly towards him. "Not even you." Gaara ignored her in a manner that suggested he was very good at ignoring things he didn't feel like noticing, and could go right on ignoring her all night, if he felt so inclined.

Sakura regarded him thoughtfully, fully aware that she was staring. But he was still glowering motionlessly at the night, either not noticing or not caring. "I wonder if we fear eternity just because it's unknown," she said at last. "Is it really that, or is it that we just don't like the idea of being so small in comparison?"

"There's no such thing as eternity."

She quirked an eyebrow.

He flicked a few fingers at the sky. "Eternity is the idea that something does not change, that it has always been one way and will always remain that way. But nothing stays the same. This place, for example, wasn't always a desert. At some point it was something else. And someday it will be something else again."

Sakura laughed quietly. "I don't know what would bother me more," she admitted. "That there is such a thing as eternity, or that there isn't."

Gaara didn't answer, but somehow his silence felt less deterring than it had before. It bolstered her courage, made her feel a little more confident. Maybe she was tougher than she thought, after all.

"What do you _do _all night, every night?" She asked, trying to keep the conversation going…and, well, maybe just to satiate a _little _curiosity. She glanced around. "Sit up here and contemplate eternity? Prowl around and watch people sleep?" _Now there's a truly disturbing thought,_ Inner Sakura shivered. "Read? Meditation? Tanuki needlepoint? You've got to be doing something to fill the time."

Gaara glanced sidelong at her. "Tanuki needlepoint?"

She laughed, delighted both with her own silliness and the faint smile that hovered briefly on his own face. It was almost a thrill, to see amusement in him that wasn't tinged with cruelty or malice. She waved a finger at him. "Joke."

The silence dragged out between them again, but she was determined to let him initiate the next conversation. This was a weird conversation, and if he actually did keep it up, it was only bound to get weirder. But she felt buoyed by her lack of fear, more awake than she'd been in days, and besides, the night sky really was beautiful. She hadn't expected to feel so…at ease around him.

"Do you dream?" He demanded suddenly.

She smiled a little – this conversation was almost predictable in its unpredictability. Maybe she was getting the hang of talking to him. "Yes. All the time."

"Why?"

She blinked. So much for getting the hang of it. She'd expected the question to be "What?" But "Why?" Well, why did anyone dream?

"I don't know" She tilted her head back, looking up at the half-moon. "My father told me once that dreams were messages from the spirits. My friend Ino used to say that they were wishes or fears. I've always thought of them as things that your mind is trying to tell you, things that maybe you missed or wouldn't think about in the daylight."

"Truths," he summarized, giving her a sideways glance.

"Yeah." She hesitated, but the curiosity was too strong. "Do you? Dream?"

He snorted. "I don't sleep. Didn't Naruto tell you?"

"I meant…" Before she could finish the thought, the full meaning of his words hit her. _You remember me_, she realized. _You remember me from when we were children. You remember that I was with there when Naruto fought you, and you almost killed me._

"Haven't you _ever_ slept?"

"A few times," Gaara turned his head fully towards her with a sudden jerk. His face was twisted into sharp angles, lips pulled back in a freakish parody of a smile, black-rimmed eyes dilated. His maniac grin bared way too many teeth, and the moon tinted his skin the faint blue tinge of a corpse. Oh yes. He remembered her. And he was enjoying the memory, it seemed. "_You_ wouldn't have liked to see it very much." His voice became rougher, agitated. "And I didn't dream. I only woke up again, to find myself surrounded by body parts and covered in blood and entrails."

_Show no fear_, she reminded herself, refusing to let her body flinch or her face wince, refusing to lean away from the leer and the dark excitement in his voice. That was way too quick; he switched from calm to killer in seconds. It was like a fire suddenly catching on oil, flaring up to consume her.

It had to be deliberate then. He changed too fast for him to be really gone. _He's _trying_ to scare me, so when I cower or run he can laugh, mock me, maybe even kill me from pure contempt. He's just trying to get a reaction out of me. _

_Well, it's about to fucking work!_ Inner Sakura gulped as he leaned in, long tongues of sand whirling up around him in agitation. His eyes slid back and forth over her face, hunting for the panic, and if he saw it, it would all be over. There was no doubt in her mind about that. "Doesn't appeal to you, does it?" He growled at her, with an edge of insane laughter in his throat.

_I am not a panicky little girl._ Sakura's resolve was shakier than she would ever admit, even to herself. She forced her heartbeat to slow, quieted the jabbering voice in her mind that wanted her to flee and flee _now_.

_I_ _will not be afraid._

She reached up, fingers outstretched, and brushed a few strands of red hair back from his forehead.

Gaara froze. The undulating sand became solid, as if it had suddenly and inexplicably turned to rock. She felt like she was suddenly sitting inside of a sculpture, a bizarre statue of a woman pressing her fingers to a marble man's face inside a whirl of petrified tentacles.

The demonic grin was gone. The angles of his face were less harsh, rounder, more human. His eyes were still wide, but now they stared at her with all the confusion of a small, lost child. In that one stone moment, Sakura felt something tighten in her chest that was neither anger nor fear. _What must it be like to grow up_, she wondered, _when everyone's too scared to even touch you? _

She traced her fingertips along his hairline until she reached his ear. Any second now, he was going to pull away, snarl, grab her wrist and snap every delicate little bone in her hand -

He closed his eyes.

_Predictable unpredictability_.

Granted this strange privilege, and with an odd fatalistic sense of having nothing to lose, Sakura let her fingers roam where they would. She brushed her knuckles down his temple, let her thumb trace the edge of the blackness around one eye. She moved slowly, carefully, lightly, but without hesitation or pause. She was afraid that if she did hesitate, it would somehow shatter the spell. Her fingers trailed along his cheekbone, over the ridge of the nose, down and around his lips. They were closed now, but they fell apart again slightly as she slid her fingertips over them, just enough for the heat of his breath to glide over her palm.

He opened his eyes again, and the intensity of his stare made her fingers falter, her breath catch. But she kept her hand where it rested along his jaw, and her eyes steadily on his. _He's looking for the trap,_ she realized.

"You don't like to be touched?" she whispered softly, because somehow it would be wrong to let him carry on his paranoid search for danger.

"People don't touch me." His voice was very hoarse, and the quiver was barely noticeable. But she heard it. "I don't touch people. I destroy everything that I touch."

"That doesn't answer the question."

Very slowly, he straightened. She dropped her hand. The sand tentacles came alive again, folding themselves back around his body protectively, as if she were some kind of threat. Then, with an abrupt jerk of his head, he vanished.

Sakura clutched her arms to her gut. Her thoughts were chaotic, whirling. _Speaking of unpredictable, _she thought weakly. _I certainly never saw _that_ coming. _

Obviously, neither had he.

Sakura raised her hand up level with her face, staring at it as if she'd never really seen it before.

What, in the name of all that was holy, was she _doing_?


	7. Ambush

A/N: At long last, chapter 7 appears (revamped with an error corrected - thanks MKRA). It took forever, and here's why: I don't like this chapter very much. I revamped it countless times before finally deciding that there was just no help for it. Unfortunately, this one's more or less necessary to get me to the next chapter, which I like a lot more. So pay attention to the plot developement/set-up, and fear not, for chapter 8 will be much swifter in arriving than this pokey thing. Final note, Misawa is pronounced Mee-sow-ah.

"...but, I've already perfected my peeking technique."  
-a young Jiraya

**Chapter 7  
Ambush **

In the desert, life was difficult in ways that Sakura had previously never considered. Water was a constant sore point; she missed the days when she could just step into the shower whenever she felt like it, and stay there for as long as she liked. Here, water was rationed and shower times were designated by the Kazekage's staff. As a high-ranking ambassador shinobi, Sakura had a relatively privileged schedule worked out. Nonetheless, it wasn't like Konoha.

What she wouldn't give to be in Konoha.

But she wasn't, and there was no use in fretting about it. Instead, she turned her attention on the world around her, and fiercely blocked the homesickness. Days turned into weeks. Sand shinobi came and went at random intervals. The only ones she bothered with were Kenji, Temari, and Gaara. She spent much of her days with Kenji, wandering the streets, aiding in the cleanup, joking with each other. Hair was a major source of amusement between them, his for being so finicky neat, hers for being, well, _pink_. "And yet still lovely," he often told her anxiously, if he thought she might be taking his teasing seriously.

Temari had visited Konoha enough that Sakura felt a vague sense of comfortable familiarity around the blonde, and she had a wry sense of humor that helped Sakura put her gloom aside. The Sand ninja was as often as gone as she was present, though, so Sakura stopped looking for her and simply waited until she appeared in the Kazekage's office building. Even Gaara vanished from time to time, although where he went, she didn't bother to consider. She wasn't here to glean the secrets of the inner workings of the Hidden Sand village, and considering the restless state of the country right now, it would be suspicious and dangerous for her to try. No, she was merely a victim of bad timing, and as such all she could do was lie low and hope they'd clean up their mess soon.

In the meantime, she practiced her chakra control. Tsunade had taught her to gather and store chakra in certain points in her body like her fists or feet, chakra that she could then release into a devastating blow. Unfortunately, storing chakra like that for more than a few days was somewhat beyond Sakura's level of control so far. The Rejuvenation Technique, Tsunade's incredible Genesis of Rebirth, required her to hold onto large amounts of chakra focused on one point in the body for months, even years. Sakura practiced trying to maintain that kind of power in her forehead like Tsunade, but after a day or sometimes two it would become painful, and she would have to do a series of chakra-wasting jutsu just to ease the pressure.

From time to time when Kenji was off attending his chunin duties, she volunteered at the hospital. It was good practice, anyway. Especially for her cooling techniques, her sunburn and sandburn jutsu. The children here got hurt far more often than she recalled happening in Konoha – but then, here they were encouraged to fight amongst each other in school. It was considered good practice. So she mended everything from broken bones to burned-out chakra systems, and at night she sat on the roof and talked to Gaara.

And she tried not to contemplate the odd disappointment she felt on those rare occasions when he did not come.

_His servant sits patiently behind him, as he considers his fingernails. Eventually, he drops his hand, and nods to her._

"_Almost every night," his servant reports obediently, knowing what he wants to hear. "Not necessarily at the same time – they seem to enjoy keeping each other guessing."_

"_What do they do?" Her master asks, as if this is the most boring thing in the world and he couldn't care less. His servant understands that to mean that he is very interested indeed. _

"_They talk, that's all. Although sometimes she touches him."_

_Her master snaps around. His servant does not look up, but she can see his feet shift in the sand before her. He is pacing, something he has not done since she has been his servant. She wonders if it means punishment for her. "She ... and he allows...?"_

"_Yes."_

_He is silent, feet coming to a standstill. "I see." Another pause, and then suddenly he puts a finger under her chin, lifting it until frightened blue eyes meet the dark glare of her master. "It is almost time for your role in this game." He tells her, examining her young, blank face with a casual sort of interest. "You should be honored, to be the key ingredient to the downfall of such a prominent and powerful man."_

_She says nothing, afraid to move, and he drops her chin with a careless jerk, no longer interested. Her eyes go back to the sand at his feet automatically, only flinching when he shoves a scroll at her. Quietly, he tells her what to do with it. _

_She listens, and bows her head, and goes to carry out his bidding._

Temari showed up in her room that morning, a glower worthy of her youngest brother firmly in place. Sakura woke instantly as a shinobi was trained to do. Even so, she still couldn't quite grasp why the Sand ninja was standing there looking like she was about to start bashing a few buildings down with that fan of hers. "Get dressed," Temari ordered her. "Come with me."

Sakura followed the fan-wielder down the street, lengthening her stride to keep up with the blonde's long legs. _Damned if she makes me trot along at her heels_. They arrived at length in a crumpled little shop that had been only haphazardly repaired after the attack at the ceremony. Inside, a little old woman hunched over her beadwork, humming to herself.

"You are to take this woman to the village of Misawa," Temari said curtly, obviously not pleased with the situation. "It should take three hours, round trip. You are to go to the village gate, leave her there, and return immediately to the report to me at the Kazekage's office."

Sakura gaped at her. "Just me?"

Temari's frowned deepened, if that was possible. "Yes." And without further ado, she turned sharply on her heel and stomped out.

What was under her skin? Probably didn't like letting Sakura wander around the Wind Country when outsider ninjas were wreaking all kinds of hell in the capital cities and villages. _But then_, Sakura mused as she helped the old lady up and slung some of the beadwork over her shoulder helpfully, _I guess that's why they need my help_. With all their own shinobi stretched to the limit trying to hunt down the insurgents, who among them had time for the smaller jobs, the D and C ranked missions, except for her? All she did all day was hang out around the village with a chunin during the day and monopolize their Kazekage at night.

Although to be perfectly fair, it wasn't like she actively sought him out. When they met, it was just as much of his choice as it was hers. He maintained that she was simply an interesting change from his normal routine, but the excuse seemed to weaken as the meetings became so regular, so habitual. She still felt the spikes of fear or nervousness, but those were gradually weakening, too. And it had started to occur to her that the random crude remarks or the silent scorn were simply his backup reactions for situations he didn't know how to deal with any other way.

Familiarity, she thought, and grinned to herself. Even Gaara prefers to hide within his comfort zone. It's just that the things that he's comfortable with tend to give other people nightmares.

The little old lady didn't talk as they strolled at her sedate pace through the streets of the village, nor did she say anything once they passed through the narrow path out of the village and walked along the sand-blown road that supposedly led to the other village an hour and a half away. Sakura regarded the route doubtfully – it was so flat, anything within miles ought to be visible from here. She pondered the problem for about twenty minutes before remembering her own initial crossing of the desert, and how the dunes always seemed lower and flatter than they tended to be. Illusions, she thought grumpily, pulling the sun hood Kenji had given her a few days before up over her pink hair. This place is all about illusions and things not actually being what they seem to be.

Oh.

Sakura slammed to a halt. Oh, _no._

The little old lady turned to look back at her impatiently. No, she was looking beyond Sakura, muttering crankily, "Well, it's about time, I'm all but cooked to my bones in this heat."

Sakura didn't look behind her, didn't pause to fully consider the trap into which she had so easily fallen. She dropped the lady's bag and slammed her elbow back, feeling it glance off flesh. Her attacker grunted – male, about a foot taller than her, thick-chested – and swiped at her with something metal even as he moved to avoid the full force of her blow. But Sakura was already down, swinging her leg around to knock the feet from under her attacker. Around to the left, another man in desert attire lunged out from where he had been lying under the sand, grasping for her ankle. Sakura evaded him, vaulting over the first enemy's head and landing behind him. She needed distance, needed to move away and try a few genjutsu or ninjutsu. She started to form a series of hand-seals, finishing just as her feet landed in the sand -

A third enemy reared out of the desert like some huge demented cobra, teeth bared and a spike-studded chigiriki lashing at her face. She ducked, but felt the tiny blades buried in the chain of the mace scored her hand as she held it up to guard her eyes. Damn! It was just enough pain to break her concentration and spoil the genjutsu that she'd been working. She was outnumbered, and certainly outclassed in the weapon department.

But not done yet. With a perfectly executed quick kick combo that would have brought proud tears to Lee's eyes (he'd spent three weeks teaching it to her), Sakura managed to get in close enough to the mace wielder to slam a fist into his face.

The man went flying back with a very satisfying crunching noise and a hefty spurt of blood, skidding hard across the sand for several feet. But she had no time to watch him land, because the other two were on her from both sides, the big one with his strange black sword and the other lobbing kunai in droves. She twisted, she ducked, she kicked, and she got in another blow that definitely shattered her larger opponent's left leg into half a dozen fractured segments. He wouldn't be using that leg soon – if ever. Sword-boy went down hard onto his good knee with a scream, and Sakura turned her immediate attention to keeping the third enemy from burying a kunai in her eyeball. The man was about her height, but much more solidly built, and his strength was almost but not quite as good as hers. She hit him hard with a disorientation technique designed to stir up the fluids in his inner ear. He toppled off of her, vomiting as the dizziness swept over him. Sakura dodged back, clenching her fist for the knock-out blow to his neck -

and cried out as she felt a searing heat in her back. _The sword bearing ninja_, she realized, twisting desperately to flip up and out from between them. _He's behind me. _The kunai wielder had pushed her back until she was within reach of that damn sword. She tried to assess the damage of the cut on her back, but no time, they were closing in on her again.

Kunai flew at her face, her heart, her guts, and she tried to back flip away but knew with a sinking certainty that the blood was rushing out of her body too fast for this to go on much longer. She tried to slam the ground, break it out from under them and maybe tangle their feet in the rubble. But the damn sand was just too yielding – all it did was spurt upwards in a great wave that came crashing back down on their heads. But even the back-surge of sand wasn't hard enough to do any real damage except get in their eyes and into the cut on her back, momentarily distracting her with the sting.

She shoved the pain away, struggling to her feet and trying to see where they would come from next. In front of her, the hunched shape of the sword ninja formed through the last of the falling sand, his pain-wild eyes staring at her in horror.

Or rather, beyond her.


	8. Wind Shift

AN: Definitely some manga-spoilers in the beginning of this one. Difficult to see if you don't know what it is already, though, so there's hope yet. Sorry guys, but plot demanded it. Secondly, I am not a medical specialist, so my knowledge of muscles, nerves, and other complex inner workings of the body are gleaned largely from independent research that I may or may not have grasped correctly. Please have patience, and point out any mistakes you see. Final note: I'm running out of memorable quotes from _Naruto._ Anybody got any suggestions?

"_I have concluded this: I exist to kill everyone else."_

_- Gaara of the Desert_

**Chapter 8  
Wind Shift  
**

Someone screamed behind her, and then the scream was abruptly cut off by a loud _snap! _

An object, large and dark, flew by her from behind, crashing into the sword-bearing ninja and knocking him down again. It was a man-sized nightmare of wood, paint, and blades that grinned hideously at its victim. Sakura stared as the war puppet's six jointed legs clamped around the man's chest. The body cavity opened, and her enemy was shoved between the gaping wooden panels. With another _snap,_ the panels slapped shut, locking the man inside. Sakura turned in time to see the third man flinging his kunai at the huge wooden lizard that reared up out of the sand before him.

He dodged backwards, but in his haste to avoid this new foe, he made the critical error of forgetting about the kunoichi at his back. Sakura lunged forward, throwing her shoulder into the small of his retreating back. Abruptly, he found himself reversing directions, flying towards the monstrous lizard. The ponderous head shot forward to meet him much faster than she would have thought possible, and the carved grin closed around the man's neck. The puppet twisted, and Sakura looked away as the decapitated body dropped to the sand.

"Nice push," her ally complimented her. He stood up, flexing his fingers in some complicated maneuver to manipulate the long thin chakra strings fixed around his knuckles. Obediently, the three wooden puppets attached to the strings moved towards him, settling in a line at his feet. The first, a frightening ram-headed demon, hunkered down to his left. The giant wooden lizard curled lazily on the right, and the grotesquely humanoid puppet that she had watched capture the sword-ninja crouched before him. From inside the humanoid puppet, Sakura could hear thumping and a few screeched curses. "Don't worry," the puppeteer told her. "He can struggle all they want, but he's not going anywhere."

Sakura recognized the painted face and affinity for war puppets immediately, but she had to struggle for a moment to recall the name attached to them. "Kan….Kankurou of the Sand?"

He smiled at her, bowing slightly. "The one and only. I take it you're the Leaf shinobi ambassador I've heard so much about. You wounded?"

"I can heal it." Sakura tried to sound calm and professional, as if she wasn't bleeding profusely from her back.

He lifted his arms, fingers dancing again, and two of the puppets promptly vanished. In their place, two slightly bloody scrolls lay neatly side by side at his feet. He scooped them up, glancing at her casually over his shoulder as he did. "Sorry I never sought you out and introduced myself formally. Been busy, you know."

The remaining puppet shook slightly as the prisoner inside threw his body against the panels. "Hey, knock it off, you'll crack Karasu's paneling and that's just annoying." Kankurou rapped the body cavity sharply with one knuckle. There was a faint metallic ring followed by a muffled screech, and then the wooden doll was silent again. "Don't worry, he's not dead yet," the puppet master told Sakura calmly as he wiped off the bloody scrolls. "I've been trying to get one of these insurgents alive for interrogation for weeks."

"And them?" She nodded quietly to the two motionless forms in the dunes, the 'yet' not lost on her either.

He shrugged. "I said I've been trying to get _one_," he repeated.

Sakura swallowed hard and forced chakra to form properly in her back, closing the wound. _Right latissimus dorsi, rhomboid major, trapezius, _she chanted to herself, concentrating on each muscle in turn as she molded the healing chakra into the tissue, weaving torn fibers back together. _Thoracodorsal artery, thoracodorsal nerve – _slowly she felt the neurons reconnecting, felt the itchy sensation of skin growing again over the knitting flesh. She could feel her store of chakra slowly draining, but refused to go into her reserve energy. What if there was another attack? No, she'd just have to let her regular chakra levels build themselves back up naturally.

It was difficult to concentrate – blood loss, heat, the shock of the attack, and the abrupt drop in adrenaline when she realized that the enemy was safely neutralized had all combined to give her a pounding headache, a sense of disorientation, and a sickening weakness in her legs and arms. She wanted to drop to the sand and throw up, maybe cry a little. She wanted to scream. _I'm a kunoichi,_ she told herself as firmly as she could. _This was just another battle. _

"Well, better head back and report this," Kankurou brushed the sand from his knees. He gestured to the war puppet, which rose up to its spider-like legs and lurched after him. Sakura took a staggering step that was, if possible, even less graceful than the puppet's ungainly motion, and immediately dropped to her knees.

"Shit," Kankurou muttered, turning to look back at her. "You look worse than I thought."

"It was deeper than it felt," she gasped. "Lost a lot of blood."

"I see." He frowned, the painted lines on his cheeks and jaw accenting the expression. "Well, it isn't that bad a situation." He squatted down, elbows balancing on his knees. "I had a chunin with me for this last mission, and when we saw you fighting I sent him to scope the area for any insurgent reinforcements. If we're lucky, he'll come back in a few minutes and I'll send him ahead to Suna for help."

"Aren't we a little close to the village for rebels to be running around unnoticed?" Sakura put a hand on the arm he held out, and pushed herself heavily to her feet. "You'd think that if there were more than these three, a patrol would have picked up on it."

"You'd think that," was all he offered in reply.

* * *

Gaara looked up from his desk when they came in, the chunin messenger leaning heavily on Temari as he panted laboriously. 

"What," the leader of the Sand village rose to his feet, "is this?"

"This is one of our message runners," Temari informed him shortly. "He's been on assignment along the borders of the Wind Country for the last few days."

"Kazekage-sama," the chunin gasped, lifting his head to meet his leader's gaze. "Trouble. A group of ninja tried to break through the blockades at the borders. They were caught by the border-guards, and in the fight two of our chunin were seriously wounded."

Gaara's face darkened.

The message-runner reached a hand to push his sweaty brown hair out of his face. "There were five of them, as far as the border-guards knew. They sustained wounds but they all got away. There's more." He swallowed nervously, obviously not expecting either of his superiors to like what he was about to say. "One of them lost his flak jacket in the fight, and the border-guards found the village symbol stitched into it as well as a scroll with a message to a spy they had on the inside of the country. Apparently the intruders were trying to get to her to give her new orders."

"Who were they?" Gaara asked, and the undercurrents of rage in his voice sending an involuntary shill down the chunin's spine.

"It was Konoha, sir."

There was a long silence in the room.

Gaara met Temari's eyes. "Where is she?"

"The desert," Temari murmured, and her face suddenly went rigid. "I _knew _there was something wrong with that mission!" She cursed softly.

"What the _hell_ is she doing in the desert?" Gaara's voice was low and calm, at odds with the dangerous tension on his face.

"One of the men gave me a scroll that had just arrived from the capital. It was very specific about asking the Leaf ambassador to aid in the effort by taking a lower class mission. Said something diplomatic about maintaining strong bonds and showing that we still trusted our allies…" Temari trailed off. "I thought it was weird, but I've never been patient with that political garbage."

"Who was the client?"

Temari's blue eyes flicked from her brother's now unfathomable expression to the chunin messenger's startled face, and she sighed, pressing a fingertip to her temple. "The Wind Country feudal lord. The mission scroll bore his seal."

Gaara turned his back on her, moving to stand by the window. To the untrained eye, he looked merely still, but Temari had long grown used to watching for the signs. She saw the slight tremor in his hands on the window sill, and noted the hard, tense lines of his shoulders under the many layers of cloth draped over his body.

"Go," she said softly to the chunin. "Organize a search party. Have her brought into custody."

He nodded and slipped out of the door.

"Gaara?" She stepped closer, one hand reaching uncertainly towards the rigid back. "Maybe it's not Saku-"

"Get out."

"Gaara . . ."

He lifted his head slightly, and the air in the room suddenly felt lethal.

Temari bit her tongue and left, hating herself for her cowardice with every step.

* * *

Sakura braced her hands on her knees and took a deep breath. Her back ached and her head still spun, but she felt steady enough to stand up straight again. She turned her head to look up at Kankurou, opening her mouth to tell him she was ready to continue. 

Bad move. The glare of sun on sand was just too bright, and she groaned as the lightheadedness returned in full force.

Kankurou waited patiently, one hand jammed into his pocket, the other still holding the chakra-strings of the war puppet. Sakura settled for straining her eyes to the side, peeking up at him through strands of sweaty pink hair. "Sorry," she grunted, feeling more weak and ridiculous and disgusting than she had in years.

He took his free hand from his pocket long enough to flick his fingers casually at her. "No rush. You're doing pretty good for being wounded and probably dehydrated." He tensed briefly, face alert, and then his features relaxed. "There's my chunin messenger," he commented, for her benefit, no doubt.

A man landed lightly on the dune ridge next to Kankurou, saluting his superior briefly before darting to Sakura's side. "Sakura! Are you alright?"

Sakura felt a rush of relief. "Kenji," she murmured, taking the offered hand and straightening. "I'm fine, I'm fine," she laughed tiredly, waving away the water bottle he shoved at her. "I've got water, and the wound is closed now. It's just dehydration and chakra depletion. Healing techniques take up a lot of chakra, that's all."

"If you say so," he stuck the bottle back in his waistband, looking less worried but not entirely convinced that she was as well off as she claimed.

"You made sure the area was clear?" Kankurou shifted his weight, pointedly drawing the chunin's attention.

"Yes, sir," Kenji replied. The muscles of his arm tensed under Sakura's hand briefly, but his face was now professionally calm. "Kankurou-san, I met up with another chunin on his way out of Suna to the border, and he told me that your presence has been requested immediately by the Kazekage. If you wish, I'll stay behind with Saku…the Leaf Ambassador while you return to the village."

Kankurou frowned, considering. "Alright," he said at last. "I'll take this," he flexed his fingers, and Karasu twitched in response, "and report back. You make sure she gets to a hospital."

"Yes, sir."

Sakura put a hand on his wrist briefly. "Thank you," she said quietly.

Kankurou winked at her. "No problem."

Sakura waited until he was out of earshot before turning to Kenji. "What was that all about?"

"What do you mean?" He asked, not quite meeting her eyes.

"You were using an urgency genjutsu," Sakura said quietly. "You wanted him to agree with you quickly, without thinking about it too much. Why?"

Kenji grinned sheepishly. "You're good with genjutsu, I take it."

"I have a few instincts," she said mildly, but her eyes stayed fixed on his face. "So tell me, why was it so important for Kankurou to - "

"I had to do it," he burst out, cutting her off. "I know it's dangerous, and it'll probably get me branded a traitor, but I…I mean, you're….well, it's just that…"

"Kenji?"

He hunched his shoulders, looking down at the sand with his fists balled up at his sides. Sakura was reminded strongly of Naruto's young friend, Konohamaru, when he was making some guilty confession. "You're my friend." The words burst out of him as if he had, at the last minute, tried to hold them back. "And I don't want to see the Kazekage rip you up."


	9. inevitable

AN: So I was re-reading this story after a couple reviews, and realized that a whole chunk of story somehow didn't make it on to the page. Hence the sudden inserted "lost chapter". It isn't much, but I don't think I can fit it into either the preceeding or following chapters because then they will be too long. It apparently wasn't necessary to understand the overall plot, but it might clarify a few things that Sakura says or notices later in the story. And it explains the story summary. For crying out loud, I'm an imbecile sometimes. Apologies!

**Chapter 8 and a half**

**Inevitable **

Sakura's mouth dropped open. _What the - ?_

"I've seen you up there with him, Sakura, at night. Before I left to run messages for Kankurou-san along the border, I saw you sitting up there talking with him, and I heard your voices. But Sakura, look –" Kenji paused, and sighed. He glanced over his shoulder, in the direction that Kankorou was steadily vanishing. Sakura kept her eyes on his face, but he didn't turn back to look at her. Instead, he seemed to lapse into a personal reverie for several minutes. At last, he closed his eyes and shook his head slightly.

"He'll kill you someday, you know."

Sakura felt her back tighten; the instant stab of pain caused by that movement forced her to concentrate solely on deadening the nerves and relaxing the muscles. The technique was difficult because it was in a place she couldn't see, but if she put all her concentration in it, she could stop the throbbing.

He'd said it so casually, so off hand and matter of fact. It was as if he were merely stating a random fact about the universe. The sky is blue. The cliffs are high. He'll kill you someday.

"You think you've got some sort of control over him," Kenji went on in that too-calm voice. "Because he hasn't really hurt you even when he was in the bloodlust. I saw him standing over you at the festival, and I fully expected him to rip your throat out. It's not like you're his responsibility here. To be honest, I don't know why he didn't kill you then." He sighed again, and shook his head. "And who knows, maybe you do have some bizarre hold on him. But Sakura – I've seen him fight. And it's not…he's not…there's a reason he's still feared in our village. He's respected, and many of us would die for him without thought. But that doesn't make him any less of a monster. Someday, he's going to lose himself, and when you try to reach him -" Kenji bit his lip. "He'll rip you apart."

Sakura shook her head violently, as if trying to shake his words away. "Why – why would he attack me?"

"That chunin I met," the Sand shinobi replied, running an agitated hand through his hair. "He told me that a group of Konoha ninja tried to get across the border, tried to get a message through to a spy they've got planted here. So everyone in Suna thinks that the spy is – "

"Me." Sakura knelt down, ignoring the heat of the sand as it burned through the material of her pants. "They think I'm a spy…"

"There's all kinds of wild rumors flying around – some even think that Konoha is backing the insurgents, if not directing them. This could get really ugly. Sakura, I don't know what you are," Kenji knelt in front of her, putting both hands on her shoulders. "But I like you, and I don't want to see you get killed. Especially if you're innocent. This may just all be rumor and misunderstanding. So look, Kankurou-san can still see us," he nodded to the dark figure dwindling in the distance. "So I want you to create a clone, and I'll pretend to walk with it until he's too far out of sight to even hope of seeing us. Meanwhile, I'll use my invisibility technique to hide you. It should last about twenty minutes after I'm gone. Go west until you reach the village of Hachinohe, there's some people who will let you stay with them if you mention my name. Hide out there for awhile until we either find the real spy or this uprising mess gets settled a bit. And Sakura," he lifted her chin up slightly and smiled into her shocked expression. "It'll be okay. Somehow, we'll make this okay."

"And Ga…the Kazekage?" She murmured, hating herself for asking, for needing to ask.

"He'll get over it," Kenji said quietly. "He's strong. And…well, he's been betrayed before. You can make it up to him when this mess it all sorted out, okay?"

"What…" her voice gave out on her, and she gave herself a mental slap. "What are you going to do when my clone disappears?" Sakura asked. "What will you do when they realize you let me escape?"

"Don't worry," he grinned slyly. "I'll just wander in with a few bruises and claim that you beat me up and ran for it."

Sakura felt something hot and wet press at the corners of her eyes, and blinked the tears back ferociously. _I will _not_ cry!_

"Get ready," Kenji muttered, and made a quick series of hand seals. Sakura felt a faint shiver race through her body. She glanced down, and had to restrain a little whimper of surprise and disorientation. Her body was gone!

"Quick, the clone," Kenji prompted, and Sakura felt (somewhere that felt too far away to be her own hands) herself make the appropriate seals. Her clone appeared in a shimmer, like a heat wave rising from a stone. Sakura wondered briefly if this was what it felt like to be a ghost. She watched her fake body "lean" on Kenji, who smiled vaguely to the air just above her head before turning to follow the black figure far ahead of him.

Sakura stayed motionless in the heat of the desert for a moment after he started walking, shuddering violently.


	10. Second Chances

A/N: This is it for the next few weeks, possibly a month, since I won't be able to update from Korea. But I'll post the next chapter as soon as I get near an internet connection, I promise. In the meantime, we are (at last) all set up for the final showdown, and if you're worried that these last few chapters have been a little slow, then fear not, for the final few will be quick, down, and dirty. Also, I realize that this chapter is a little choppy, because I jump from scene to scene. I'm pondering how to fix that.

"You have no talent. Just die."  
- Jiraiya, to Naruto

**Chapter 9  
Second Chances**

The quiet desert night stole slowly over the yellow and brown clay buildings, leeching away the few pale colors of Sunagakure. There was no moon tonight, and the stars seemed distant and weak. The village turned the color of a livid bruise: all purple, black, and blue. Shadows coiled themselves around the walls and streets, settling over the world like a muffling blanket.

In the darkness, high above the streets on the roof of the tallest building, he shifted his weight and growled low in his throat, once.

"Kazekage-sama?" A quiet voice all but whispered from his left. "We've found a trail in the desert. It's not much, and it will be gone by morning, but if we go now we will likely find her by noon."

"No."

The ninja kneeling to the left shifted. "Sir, Kankurou-san reports that she was wounded, likely very weak, and with only a small canteen of water. If we leave her, she will die within a few days. If we catch her, we might be able to at least get information -"

"I said _no_."

"Yes, Kazekage-sama."

The shinobi left, and once more there was only the whisper of the desert wind in the moonless night. Nothing but the shadows and the sky that to her had been frighteningly vast.

She had laughed, and shivered, and mused aloud, and all the time it had been a calculated ruse. And he had, like the great fool he had tried so hard not to be, fallen right into it.

"_You."_ He hissed into the night, baring his teeth as if he planned to rip out her throat with them. Maybe he did. "You _lied_!"

The night did not reply.

"She sent you a message," he said then, softly, under his breath. "Asking if you were alright and if you'd completed your mission. Your _mission_," he snarled, "to gather information on the Sand Village Kazekage. You were _spying_ on me. All of _this,"_ he held up a hand, palm facing the empty streets, and there was a strange expression of pain on his face, "was to get at me, so you could report it all back to her." He laughed suddenly, wildly.

In his mind's eye, he saw her running through the desert, running towards the border and her freedom. He watched, body so taut that the muscles jerked from strain. The sand shifting around his feet shivered with the anticipation of the kill, surging up and around him, towards her. _**Blood**,_ the familiar darkness whispered in his mind. **_Blood for pain. Blood is better than pain. Pain is mine. Blood is pain that is not mine. Not ours. _**

The pale pink of her hair vanished into the red haze that blocked his mental vision now. **_Blood is pain that is not mine. Blood is better_.**He could send the sand. Even now he knew she could not be too far away, could still be within his range should he chose to hunt her tonight. He _could_ hunt her, find her alone and weak in the desert and he could strangle her with his own hands, break her bones, rip out her throat or her heart. He could glory in the blood, because the **_blood_** **_was her pain, not ours,_** sang the demon, and he smiled in agreement.He could enjoy it,because her pain was good. His was….

He crouched, ready to jump.

"Yashamaru," he whispered.

The murderous sand turned at the sound, and swirled around him. In a moment, the roof was empty, and silent.

* * *

She didn't know how long she ran across the never-ending dunes before her feet betrayed her and she stumbled. _Betrayed_…_I didn't betray you!_ She wanted to scream it back at him, scream it so loud that the whole world could hear it.

Some small, rational part of Sakura was cautioning her not to cry, not to waste the moisture her body would need when the brutal sun came up, as it would soon if the faint reddish tinge in the sky was any indication.

But she couldn't stop, even if it was stupid. She was stupid. (_You think you have some measure of control, _Kenji said softly, his voice chasing her down the side of one sand dune and up the other._ Well, he's been betrayed before…)_

"I didn't…" she sobbed again, and threw a hand up to shield her eyes as the sun burst over the horizon.

* * *

"_They are getting close." The girl kneels at his feet, keeping her eyes carefully averted. Her master does not bother to look at her, consumed in his own mysterious thoughts. _

"_The Sand shinobi? To me?" He asks at last, deigning to glance down at her bent head._

"_No, master. Your hand is yet unrevealed, and the Sand ninjas have no indication of your position among the insurgents. I refer to your supporters. They are gathering nearer for the final attack." She swallows nervously, and her fear is duly noted. He would smile at her fear, but he is still irritated with her recent failure. It is not often that he does his own dirty work, and he does not like the necessity of cleaning up his servant's near-disastrous mess._

"_I see. In that case, I'm going to give you a second chance to prove your worth to me. Try not to fuck this up, will you?" She does not move, but the smooth annoyance in his tone burrows into her stomach where it hardens into fear and perhaps something else that she cannot name. "First, I want them delayed." _

"_How long should they be delayed, sir?"_

"_Oh, a week or two at least. Have them blow up a few more political buildings or something." He waves a hand dismissively._

"_Yes, master…" her voice trails off, leaving the question hanging unspoken. After all, it is one thing to have a network of rebels and missing-nin all over the large kingdom of Wind, quite another thing to concentrate all those rebels in a smaller area for several days and hope the nearby shinobi village didn't notice them._

"_I have my reasons for this decision," he tells her sternly, before she dares to question him and forces him to kill her for the sake of precedent. "Second, I want your captured subordinate neutralized before they get anything useful out of him."_

_She bows her head again, flinching at the reminder of her abysmal failure. Gently, he puts a hand on her head. "Dear little sister," he says softly, and there is all the forgiveness and compassion in the world in those three little words, enough to tighten her chest and almost, almost bring a tear to her blue eyes. "You have learned an important lesson today. Never choose subordinates because you like them. Chose them because they are strong enough to do your bidding, but weak enough to never overthrow you. Liking your men is a weakness that efficient men cannot afford."_

_He thinks of weaknesses, of wide green eyes and a sweet, sad smile, and two low voices floating down through cool night air. It makes his eyes narrow, and he moves away from her, running his hand through his own hair in a moment of agitation. "Are you prepared for the sacrifice?" He demands suddenly, and because he is distracted, he misses the emotion that flickers briefly on her face before she answers. _

"_Yes, sir."_

_He is calm again instantly, and with a casual wave of his hand orders her to go. _

_She goes, and a moment later he is gone as well, and only the desert remains.

* * *

_

The first day went by in a strange dreamlike-haze. Sometimes she moved. Sometimes she lay on her back with the torn cloth from her shirt over her face to shield it from the sun. At first she thought of nothing but what had happened: the ambush, the fight, the abrupt news that she was a branded spy and traitor.

It hurt, to think about that, so after a little while she made herself stop. She thought about Konoha for awhile, because heat and thirst drove her to recall shady trees, cool streams, ice cream, and leaves swirling in the wind as Lee grinned at her, flashing the thumbs up, as Naruto came flying at her with a high kick that she blocked just as Lee had shown her how to do. She thought about cold nights and snow and the fierce blush on Ino's face on New Year's Eve when Shikamaru had kissed her in front of everyone. (_Well, I had to shut her up somehow, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.)_

She thought about Sasuke, and the empty feeling of rejection.

_(You're really annoying.)_

She thought about Tsunade, and all the second chances that had come with the woman. A second chance for Sasuke, for Lee, for the legendary sannin herself. A second chance for Sakura, to become something more than a nuisance, an annoyance.

(_I'm a hard teacher, and it won't be easy for you.) _

Sakura closed her eyes, felt the sand baking beneath her bruised back, felt her breath push against aching stomach muscles, and thought about second chances. How many had Gaara been given? How many had he ever given himself?

_(Well, he's been betrayed before.)_

As the sun set on the first day, and the heat slackened and became bearable again, she realized that she couldn't give it up yet. Not as easily as that. She could give him the second chance he'd never had, and she would force him to give her the second chance she deserved.

Sakura sat up and sipped some of the water from her canteen, grateful that she had refilled it before leaving yesterday (only yesterday?). _If I go back like this, _she thought grimly, running a mental check through her body to assess her physical status, _he'll kill me. I won't even have the chance to tell him, to make him see. _

Chances. How could she make sure she got that second chance?

Sakura touched her forehead wearily, felt the throbbing of a sun-induced headache. She ran her finger over the point between her eyes, concentrating chakra to sooth away the ache.

And then it hit her.

Now all she needed was a little time.

* * *

It kept her going through the night as she plodded through the sand, ignoring the pain of her ribs and back, ignoring the grit as it got into her mouth and her shoes and her shirt, rubbing her raw under her clothes. She could have used more chakra to deal with these things, to ease the pain of bruises and raw skin, but she needed it elsewhere now. _Concentrate, concentrate, hold out against the pain_, Sakura urged herself, chanting it over and over until she could hear nothing else.

It kept her going through the second day, as she staggered along the ridges of unforgiving scalding sand. The pain in her head was intense, like something large and powerful was trying to claw its way out of her brain through a little hole in her forehead. Through the haze, she saw the vague outlines of a village forming among the rippling heat of the desert sand. An old woman stood in front of her baked-clay home, watching the apparition that was a woman stagger out of the desert.

The sun beat down on her mercilessly, burning into her body, into her brain and her guts. If she stayed in this sun any longer, it would burn her all the way through, leaving nothing but the charred remains of what had once been a human woman. There would be nothing but bleached bones and a few bits of metal until the desert sand shifted and claimed those, too.

The old woman was shouting something now, and people were appearing, coming towards her with jugs of water and concerned frowns.

She couldn't die yet, couldn't let the fire of the sun consume her. She had to reach him first, had to tell him, prove to him that it hadn't all been a lie.

The cool splash of water over her burned face pushed back the haze long enough for her to meet the old woman's eyes. The compassion in that plain peasant face soothed her more than the sudden shade thrust over her head. As she allowed herself at last to sink into the cool darkness of her own mind, let hands worn from the desert pick her tired body up and carry her out of the fierce sun, one final thought wrapped itself fiercely around her heart. She couldn't let it end this way.

* * *

"Sir?"

Kankurou tilted his head slightly to study his approaching subordinate with narrow eyes.

"Feeling better?"

"Yes, sir," the chunin blinked, raising a self-conscious hand to tap the swollen flesh of his face gingerly. "The damage wasn't really all that bad – it just stunned me, that's all."

"You're not the only one," the puppet-master muttered, recalling the expression on his brother's face when he'd learned that the Konoha ambassador had attacked a Sand shinobi and fled into the desert.

"Sir, I'd like to request that I be put on the search party to find Saku- I mean, to find the ambassador," Kenji stepped forward earnestly, biting his lip.

Kankurou shook his head, looking back out across the desert. Heat rose off the glaring sand in lethal waves, angry winds blew hot and unforgiving across the treacherously gentle-looking dunes. "There isn't going to be a search," Kankurou said quietly.

"What?" Kenji's eyes snapped open. "Sir, it's been days already. She's probably near-death – if we go now we can get her in a weakened state." He paused, waiting for Kankurou to answer. When his superior simply stood there, silent, he took an urgent step forward, hands coming up in near supplication. "Sir, we can't question her if she's dead! And besides, it isn't ethical, it isn't right to leave someone out in - "

"These are orders from your Kazekage." Kankurou barked, straightening to his full height. The chunin faltered, and after a moment looked away.

"Yes, sir," he said, voice only showing a hint of sullen anger under the carefully schooled tone of respect.

"I know she was your friend," Kankurou sighed after a moment of silence. "But you should know better than to get emotionally involved with anyone, especially shinobi from rival villages. In our line of work, it only sets you up for pain."

He strolled off casually, only slowing long enough to glance up at the window in the Kazekage's office above him. "It only gives you more pain," he told the window and the man he knew stood just behind it.

* * *

_He is angry; his servant can see it in the way he stands with his hands in his pockets, staring at her expressionlessly. She bows her head as she has been taught, not looking at him. _

"_It is nearly time," he says at last. "Have them brought to the village from the north. I will alert the Kazekage." He all but spits the name, and his servant has a sudden flash of insight as to what has invoked his ire. But she does not dwell on it - he is speaking to her again, and she listens intently. _

"_Tell them to arrive at sunset in one week. I will see to it that he is waiting for them."_

"_Yes, master," she whispers, rising._

_His voice halts her before she can leave, and there is something ugly in the words. "Is she dead?"_

_His servant answers. "She made it five days before she fell. She did not rise again."_

"_Very well. In the end, this can probably be used to my advantage just as much as if he had killed her himself." The ugliness is gone from his voice. He sounds almost pleasant. "The desert will tend to her remains. It's fitting."_

_He does not notice that his servant leaves a little too quickly. He does not ever look at her, anyway, so again he does not see the short-lived spark of emotion across her otherwise expressionless face. If he had seen it, he might have been hard pressed to name it. Fear, hate, and just a tiny bit of triumph. _


	11. Rising Gale

A/N: Um. Yeah. I DID miss a chapter. Went right over it and posted chapter 11 in place of chapter 10. Head, meet desk. Desk, head. So, after all the confusion and startled reviews – meet the REAL chapter 10. Sigh.

"You must always look underneath the underneath."

Hatake Kakashi (had to put it in sooner or later).

**Chapter 10  
Rising Gale**

Sakura stopped outside the entrance to the Hidden Sand village, and waited. She stood in the open, with her sun-hood pulled back so that the last rays of the sunset could catch her pink hair. She kept her face up and her eyes open so that anyone who was watching could see that her eyes were green, that she wore a Konoha forehead protector around her head, and that she had absolutely no intention of leaving. No one who saw her could fail to deliver a very accurate description of her to their superior, and that was exactly what she intended for the shinobi who guarded the city limits to do.

But no one hailed her, and though she stood there for a long time, no one came rushing out to attack her either. _I've only been gone three weeks, _she thought sourly to herself, in a vain attempt to cover her nervousness with irritability._ Don't tell me they've forgotten what I look like already._

She chucked an exploding note into the air, watching the sheer stony walls of the pathway into Sunagakure carefully. Nothing moved as the minor thunder caused by the explosion rolled over the desert.

_Well, he has to know I'm coming by now,_ she thought at last, and started slowly into the city.

She knew something was wrong long before she made it past the first few empty streets. The place was utterly deserted, nothing moved except the wind as it wailed through the narrow streets, catching at doors and shutters that had been left hanging half open. The only time she'd ever seen everything look so abandoned - as if everyone had picked up and vanished in a great hurry - had been the night of the festival, when all her troubles had begun.

Sakura picked up her pace, hunting for some clue of where the battle might now be taking place, but she could see nothing. There were no vibrations in the ground when she put her ear to it, no smell of blood or the faint burnt smell of chakra being discharged in large amounts. She could feel, once or twice, the frightened energies of people hiding below her in the secret holes like the one she had hid in with the child that night. But she didn't stop to look in on them. They were safe where they were, and no one who knew what was really going on was likely to be among them.

A prepared battle, she realized. The shinobi must have seen an enemy coming, raised an alarm, and gone out to meet the enemy somewhere that wasn't in the middle of their village. They sent the civilians underground to hide, and wait out the storm.

But where then could they be? She had seen nothing as she came up, and a battle large enough to involve all the shinobi, even Gaara –

The other side of the mountains, she realized, looking up at the towering red stone cliffs. She had come from the south side of the mountain range that encircled the village. The only thing she couldn't have seen was on the other side.

_I won't be left behind this time_, she thought fiercely, and took off into the deepening twilight.

* * *

She could hear it long before she could see anything. The mountain rumbled, boulders would occasionally loosen and go crashing down nearby her, once almost right out from under her feet. She was breathing hard – jumping through mountains was a little different from jumping through trees. For one thing, the dry air chaffed at her mouth and throat, and for another, there was only a smattering of slowly appearing stars tonight to offer any light. It was difficult to see what was real rock and what was only shadow.

But she could hear the battle raging closer and closer, and the urgency of it swept her along too fast to worry about anything other than her destination.

The moon was only just beginning to peer over the sandy horizon when she heard the first sounds of battle. A Sand shinobi was locked in a deadly struggle with a ninja wearing no sign of his origins. The Sand ninja was pinned to a rock with a gooey yellow chakra that oozed over his body. Sakura dove into the fight in time to knock away a blade that otherwise would have gone through the pinned Sand nin's heart. The enemy that had thrown the knife next threw himself at her, swinging for her face. The hit missed, but she felt a shock wave of air slam into her head moments after the fist passed by. Sound trick, she thought, remembering the Sound ninja from her first chunin exam.

She felt her guts roil, but before she could vomit, her hands flew into a series of seals. She watched with some relief as the Sound shinobi dropped to his knees, hurling. "Mirror Genjutsu," she explained quietly to the Sand ninja as she cut through the gooey chakra net with her chakra-scalpels. "His attack has the mental effect of making you very dizzy and sick, and the mirror genjutsu makes the user of a mental attack feel the effects himself instead of you."

"Watch out!" he cut her off. Sakura whirled in time to catch the fist that came flying out of the darkness behind her. The Sand shinobi shrugged out of the rest of the sticky trap, and together they converged on the second enemy ninja that had appeared too late to back up his partner.

"There's a bunch of these unmarked shinobi," her companion told her as they moved off through the rocky terrain, leaving the bodies behind. "They were being led by a -" His face contorted bitterly, "A traitor Sand shinobi. I didn't get a good look at him. I think he's been acting as some no-name genin or chunin, but it seems he's the real mastermind behind the whole insurgency."

Sakura felt her guts twist again, but this time no genjutsu could shake away the feeling. A traitor Sand nin? Something about this felt all too familiar. Was he really a Sand shinobi or was he Sound in disguise? Could it even be…

Sasuke?

_He might have come to fight Gaara_, she thought desperately as the Sand nin lead her down a ravine towards the sound of more fighting. _Maybe he has to prove that his earlier defeat at Gaara's hand was a fluke. _She felt a surge of something that she couldn't quite describe in her chest.

"We're being followed," the Sand ninja that she had rescued said suddenly, in her ear. "Four, maybe five, I think." He shrugged one shoulder off to the left. "Too far for them to see us, but they're catching up. I tried to throw an illusionary technique over our track, but they went right through it."

"Let me try," she whispered back, and made a few hand seals that she had picked up from hours of researching the archives in the Hokage's office. The Sand shinobi put his ear to the ground, concentrating for several moments before standing up and nodding. Sakura returned the nod curtly, but couldn't resist the satisfaction that flushed through her at the look of respect on his face.

"That ought to keep them busy," he murmured, and then they were off, down into the ravine. Down towards the crashing and the screaming.

It was chaos at the foot of the mountains. They arrived as the sky was beginning to turn a murky grey, signaling the incoming heat of day. The semi-gloom was highlighted by flashes of light, by pale and dark shapes dodging, jumping, and screaming around each other. Sprays of sand surged up and fell back like waves crashing into the cliffs as the fighters struggled. A huge gust of wind nearly threw Sakura back into the rock wall and drove sand into her face, but she managed to hold her ground long enough for the attack to abate. She followed the unnatural wind back to its source – Temari.

"Watch your back!" Her Sand shinobi companion bellowed to her, and with a blood-curling war-cry he plunged into the melee. The Leaf kunoichi had no time for such theatrics. She maneuvered her way through the battle, avoiding puddles of blood and resisting the temptation to run to some of the downed fighters.

"Where is he?" she bellowed over the roar, dodging to avoid what appeared to be a large cat made of sand that pounced on an enemy ninja with outstretched claws. Temari leaped out of the way too, and they landed almost simultaneously several feet to the right. The blonde threw an arm up to point, but by then Sakura had already caught sight of the tsunami-sized wave of sand as it shattered into the mountain side, raining boulders down on the shinobi war below. The combatants burst into view a second later, and Sakura bit her lip to keep from screaming.

Gaara was standing on a raised tongue of sand, face contorted in rage, body partially morphed into the sand demon that had haunted her nightmares for months when she was twelve years old. Opposite him, amidst the newly-broken rocks of the cliff face, crouched the traitor Sand ninja. He was panting, but his face was calm, even pleased.

Sakura stared, and felt a whole new form of betrayal wash through her.


	12. Betrayel and Trust

A/N: OK, so after that whole "lost chapter" fiasco, here's the way this chapter should have been introduced. Dang me for giving it all away, eh?

In the meantime: I have three different places I can go after this. Tragic ending, realistic ending, and pseudo happy ending. Debating which to put up – actually, also debating putting up all three, but not sure if that would detract from the story. Opinions on these issues, and of course the story itself, are welcome. And on an encouraging note, almost done!

"As long as I live, I will always appear when you need me."

Rock Lee

**Chapter 11**

**Betrayal and Trust**

Kenji's face was contorted with gleeful triumph.

"I originally wanted you to kill her yourself, you know," he was yelling, over the noise of the battle below. "That's why I killed the Sand chunin who was running back to tell you about the Leaf chunin raid at the border. I killed him, and changed the message. There was no scroll for their spy." He laughed, and winked. "_There was no spy_."

The sand rose around him, twisting itself into larger copies of Gaara's monstrous limbs. The sand-claws crashed into Kenji's body, but the body only dissolved into smoke. Shadow clone. "Then I tried to have my followers kill her, with that fake mission in the desert." He reappeared on the rocks above the first clone, still grinning, still shouting. The claws angled, redirecting upwards and slamming into his face. _Poof_ – another clone. "At that point," he laughed from the sands below Gaara's perch, "it was more an experiment to see just what kind of reaction you would have."

_He's invisible,_ Sakura realized, as this third body likewise dissolved when the sand crushed down on it. _He's using an invisibility illusion and shadow clones to manipulate Gaara._

"Your reaction was even stronger than I anticipated," another Kenji called from behind Gaara. "I was angry about that at first. I hate when my pawns don't react the way I expect them to. But this," he threw a sweeping gesture at Gaara's enraged face just before a spike of sand negated the clone. Another appeared, slightly further on. "And when your damned brother came along and saved the fucking day, I figured that having you think she'd betrayed you and then run off into the desert to die would probably be the smartest course of action."

A tentacle of sand encircled the talking clone, but another one lashed out at seemingly empty air to the left of the clone. Kenji's clone face registered some mild surprise just before it dissolved. The next one appeared a few feet further back, looking less smug.

_Gaara knows,_ Sakura thought with some relief. _He knows about that invisibility technique, and the real Kenji is invisible, somewhere close by. He's trying to hit the real one too. But how does he know where to strike?_

"Tell me, Gaara, how does it feel to be betrayed like that? You must be an expert by now."

"She trusted you," Gaara rasped, eyes narrowed to dark slits.

"Of course," the Sand nin laughed, reaching up to brush his fingers over his hair in a gesture Sakura knew too well._ "_That was the whole point." Another crushing blow destroyed the talking clone, but this time two random tentacles of sand whipped out into what appeared to be empty air. Gaara tilted his partially transformed head towards the empty space, and she thought she saw a flash of satisfaction on the warped features.

_He's **listening**,_ she realized. _He can tell that the voice from the clones is originating somewhere else, and he's trying to listen for the real source._

"I just wanted to use her as a means to destabilize you, to soften you up for this moment, this fight," Kenji went on. _Yes, _Sakura thought savagely. _Keep talking. _

"And I have to say, in _that_ she exceeded even my highest expectations. You're remarkably easy to manipulate, emotionally. But that's enough talk," Kenji raised his hand, and a girl appeared obediently in front of him. She was small, pale, and wearing the clothing of an ordinary Wind country villager. But even from her distant place, Sakura could see a dull sort of fear in her bright blue eyes. Without a word, she knelt down before Kenji and bowed her head.

"And if it comes to betrayal, Gaara," Kenji said, his friendly tone almost as horrific as the knife he raised over the strange girl's head, "she trusted you, too. And you left her to die in the desert, despite Kankurou's report that she was wounded and weak." He shook his head. "Which of us betrayed her more?"

On the ground below, Sakura felt the intent to kill a fraction of a second before her opponent hit her. She ducked, feeling the powerful chakra ripples go through her pink hair, mere centimeters from her skull. The enemy shinobi who had thought she was too distracted to fight back learned a hard lesson in her last few moments of life. It took Sakura about twenty seconds to slam a well-placed fist into the strange woman's jaw, snapping the head back and breaking the spine. She spun back around, searching the dark sky.

Kenji's servant was lying at his feet, blue eyes now staring blankly at the feeble moon as blood gushed from the grisly red smile on her throat. Tendrils of red and black chakra were rising off the corpse like heat, swirling in the air and closing themselves around her murderer's right arm. Seeking to catch his enemy off balance in the midst of this strange ritual, Gaara sent a heavy whip of sand slicing down on him. The red and black chakra knocked it away. This, then, was the real Kenji.

There was a brief flash of painful red light that sliced into Sakura's eyes. She blinked hard to clear them, and then wished she hadn't.

Kenji was still smiling, a sweet little grin that was at gruesome odds with the rest of his heaving body. The flesh on his right arm was warped, the swollen, bulging muscles laced with black poison. The red and black chakra swirled menacingly around the mutated arm, and he radiated the cloying sour-sweet smell of rotten eggs and raw meat left in the hot sun. The rest of his body was drenched in the blood of the girl at his feet, but it stayed relatively human. His right hand was a demon claw, and in it the red chakra screamed with the high, thin voice of a dying girl. Before her eyes it stretched and grew until it became like a great sword of humming energy.

He laughed again, a wet, gurgling noise that sounded to Sakura like flesh being squished beneath stone. The nightmare that had been Kenji leaped, arm outstretched. Something dark slammed into his left arm, forcing him to twist violently in midair. He swung the chakra sword viciously in response, severing the claw that nonetheless continued to dig into the flesh, ripping at muscles and tendons.

Gaara roared as the red and black light sliced through his flesh, but the sand only melted away, leaving his human arm bare for a mere second until the sandy demon-flesh reformed. The Kazekage had not remained idle while his opponent had changed; he had responded in kind by allowing his own body to warp further into the tanuki form. He was almost fully gone, Sakura saw – but his eyes were open, and they glowed green. Gaara, not Shukaku, was still in control.

Deep inside, Sakura's insides writhed in revolt. Memories of her first chunin exam, of the fight in the forest outside of Konoha rose unbidden in her mind. But then, she had been unconscious by the time Gaara had fully let go of his control. And though Naruto had told her what he had become, the cheerful Leaf ninja had not described the sick smell of blood and entrails, the festering stench of rot that emanated from the demon flesh. He had not told her the screech that sliced at her ears like a knife. She had known it was horrific but – (_'knowing about something and being confronted with it are different,' Gaara insisted flatly.)_

"Move!" Temari thrust her shoulder into Sakura's abdomen, using her momentum to hurl them both clear before the battle above came slamming down into the ground where they had been standing. Sakura rolled to her feet, threw a chakra-charged knee into the face of an enemy who somehow appeared behind her, and then launched herself back towards the overhead battle, leaving Temari to handle the incoming attackers. The woman was more than capable, judging by the howl of wind that drowned their screams behind her.

But her attention was elsewhere. "No choice!" she heard a scream, blurred into tones that no human voice could have achieved. It was as if Kenji spoke with two throats, two sets of vocal cords set on different octaves. His plain, round face was set in a mad grin, mouth wide open, teeth bared. "Let him come! Let him come _now_!" he shrieked, as he turned, leaping at the steep cliff side. "Let _him_ fight me!"

In a terrible rush of insight, Sakura saw, and understood.

Kenji had lead Gaara here, into the thick of the battle between their subordinates. He had harried and pushed, but now that they had arrived here, here amongst the people they lead, Kenji would no longer dance around with smoke and shadow clones. He would fight Gaara with everything, heedless of the people around him. Gaara would have no choice but to respond in kind, to unleash the demon tanuki where it might destroy Kenji but would certainly kill everyone else. If he tried to shield himself, hide inside the impenetrable sand shell, Kenji would merely turn this powerful blood-chakra sword on the people he had sworn to protect.

_Choices_, Sakura thought, as Kenji slammed against the cliff wall, leg muscles bunching for the push-off leap that would carry him straight at Gaara. The chakra sword flamed brighter, the angry red overwhelming the burning black. It hurt to look at. _Kenji chooses a victory over the lives of his subordinates. He'll kill them for the sake of his own strength, and his own life. _

And he was forcing Gaara into the same position.

No other choice.

Except, she realized, one.

Kenji rebounded from the cliff, somersaulting in the air to bring the blazing sword back for a killing thrust. Gaara's only choices were to summon the impenetrable sand shield, or close his eyes and let Shukaku come.

Or.

He could drop his arms. He could let the sand run away from his body, exposing unmarred human skin. He could stand there, watching his death fly towards him. He could even smile, as the blade split screaming air to bury itself in soft, yielding flesh.

But not his. Gaara's triumphant grin faded, warping on his gaunt face into something much more frightening, and much more human. For the first time in his life, he felt fear surge up in his guts, and for the first time in many years, horror and shock writhed in his chest.

A flash of pale pink, a glint of blue chakra as her kunai scored into Kenji's face even as the chakra blade ripped across her body, and then she slammed backwards. Gaara threw out his hands instinctively, but the sand moved quicker, blocking her flying body before she could hit his chest, knocking what it perceived as a threat to the ground several feet away. He was left standing there, arms groping at the empty air like a child chasing a butterfly, or a dream.

Dimly, Gaara was aware of his opponent's scream of pain, aware that somehow she had managed to draw a deep gash across one of those pale brown eyes in a last act of defiance.

He knew, but it did not touch him. The world constricted and narrowed until all he could see was a crumpled body lying face down in the torn up earth, absurdly pink hair splayed awkwardly over her face, hiding her eyes. Her body was in an unnatural, graceless heap, and a her teeth were stained bright red. Her lips were open, and they moved a little. He couldn't hear the sounds that may or may not have come out of them, but the wind blew a lock of sweaty hair to reveal one green eye that met his own, and he knew what she had said anyway.

"_You_?" The hoarse yell was enough to snap him back into the reality of blood and battle. Kenji crouched low on the ground nearby, bleeding face mirroring the shock on Gaara's own. "She lied to me," he hissed, remaining eye rolling to stare in disbelief at the bloody corpse of his former servant. "She told me you were _dead_!"

Gaara turned, and hell itself cowered when they met again.


	13. And We All Fall Down

A/N: Still haven't quite decided which ending to put up as the official one. Could go either way. Will ponder this some more on my next airplane. Sorry updates so jerky lately – internet access been spotty at best. Not every country in the world wires in the same way (China, for example, uses a whole format for power outlets that even the most demented U.S. manufacturer has never dreamed). Will be back in the States soon, though, and maybe schedule will even out a little more. Until then, thanks for all the support, reprimands, and suggestions.

"Please make me your apprentice. I want to be stronger. I need to be stronger."

Haruno Sakura

**Chapter 12**

**And We All Fall Down**

She was falling very fast, but somehow very slow, because she hadn't hit the ground yet and she should have.

No, not falling. Some vague part of her mind recognized the movement for what it really was: jumping. Rather, being carried by someone who was jumping. She dared to open her eyes.

Green. Glowing with the pale flame of a huge chakra. Running.

"Lee," she croaked – or tried to, anyway - and the blurring speed slowed a little, the strange red face surrounded by dark hair looked down at her.

"Sakura," he said, and his voice was very far away. She tried to reach it, tried to drag her arm up through the thick heavy mud that bogged her down and grab onto the warmth, the safety that his voice promised. She hadn't felt safe in so long…

"No, Sakura, you must not struggle," he soothed her, tightening his grip around her shoulders and legs. "It's alright now. I'll get you to a medic. I'll protect you."

_Protect me,_ she thought dreamily. _You_ _always protect me. Always safe._

Someone was screaming at her. It wasn't a very nice sound. _Stop that_, she thought irritably. _I want to sleep. And I can't hear Lee over you. I want to hear Lee…_

_Gaara!_ The voice was screaming. _**Gaara**!_ Inner Sakura's mental shriek blew away some of the fog that surrounded her, snapped her back fully into a body that jerked with the intense pain in her guts, with cold creeping down her arms and legs and hot blood gushing from her side and sloshing over her chest.

"Lee!" she choked. "Hands – seal. Help me!" The last words burst out of her, and she knew if he didn't understand she was dead because her ability to speak more was highly questionable.

But he came to an immediate halt, and shifted his arms around her until she was propped against his chest. He closed his hands over her wrists, bringing them up and forcing her lifeless fingers into a focusing seal. Cold – she was freezing. He pushed her rigid finger joints into the seal, and Sakura stared at her hands with rapidly narrowing vision, feeling bewildered and detached. Slowly, painfully, she forced herself to ignore the disorienting sensation that those hands were not attached to her body.

The seal wasn't the one she'd planned to use, but it would do just as well. After all, it wasn't the hand seals that really mattered. She tried to focus her mind again. The coldness crept further inwards towards her heart, and darkness pressed in on her, threatening to crash down and plunge her into the icy water…

_Do it,_ she told her voice. _Do it **now.**_ But no sound could work its way past the rising blood and bile, no sound could force through the sticky dark that came to claim its prize.

"Gene…sis of …Rebirth," Sakura murmured thickly, and felt the blood surge into her mouth.

The pain vanished, and something warm poured itself through her, filling her with light and energy and peace. She reveled in it, delighted in the feel of sweet, vibrant life.

"Sakura?"

She opened her eyes. "You came for me."

Lee supported her as she tried to stand. Once, he might have taken this opportunity to give her the dramatic speech, to flash the nice-guy pose and sparkle a little in the bargain. But their friendship had long ago moved beyond that. "Of course," was all he said. "Always."

She let go of his hand experimentally, but her legs were too weak. He caught her before she could fall hard on her knees. "I thought that Rejuvenating Technique was supposed to fully heal you," he said worriedly, watching her shaky breathing and drawn, pale face.

"It does, when someone like Tsunade-sensei does it," Sakura agreed, smiling self deprecatingly. "If I'd had the amount of chakra she normally has stored, I could have done it too. But it takes months to build up the kind of chakra needed for a full repair job that big, and I only figured out the trick about three weeks ago."

"Then how did you ever build up enough chakra for that technique?"

"I didn't, exactly." The pain in Sakura's smile was mostly physical, but there was a hint of sadness, too. "The jutsu takes time off of your natural life span when you use it. I just took a little more than it normally would."

Lee's hand tightened on her arm, horrified. "It's alright," she reassured him. "It's not like I'm going to die next week now, or something. Maybe just a year or two before I was going to as an old woman." _Or three or four, more likely_, Sakura muttered darkly to herself, but she couldn't think about that right now. She glanced around, trying to get her bearings. Lee had brought her back up the rocky ravine, away from the battle, towards the village. Around her, several shapes were likewise running past them in the dark, some dragging others.

"The Sand ninja who can still move are going back to Suna," Lee told her. "It's too dangerous out there for any human, now."

A faint unearthly shriek rent the air, and the ground trembled. Green eyes widened. "Take me back."

"Sakura, that's not an option. You can see that the Sand shinobi are retreating. The insurgent forces have been put down or scattered, but….Gaara has gotten completely out of hand. In your condition, you'll only be hurt again."

"Lee," she looked up at him, eyes glittering with something that looked suspiciously like tears. Lee hated it when people he cared about cried. It made him feel so helpless. "Please," she said softly, and Rock Lee, the legendary strong man of Konoha, cursed himself for being so weak.

He sighed.

"This way," he turned, and carefully pulled her onto his back. "Naruto and Kiba are trying to wake him up before he knocks the mountains down, or at least hedge him in until he comes back to himself. Shikamaru and Temari are dealing with the wounded, taking them away down the ravine to a cave Shikamaru marked as a backup hiding spot when we were following you."

"It was _you_," she mumbled, trying to get a good hold on his shoulders even with her exhausted arm muscles. "I knew someone was following me, but I never thought it was you."

"Your genjutsu was wonderful," he complimented her, gathering his legs and taking a flying leap back the way they had come. "It took a whole half hour for Shikamaru to figure a way out of it. He was not pleased."

Shikamaru was there. Kiba. Naruto. "You snuck in," she muttered against his shoulder, but the wind of their passing blew the soft words away from his ears. The chunin team that they caught at the border, she mused silently, not bothering to waste energy to speak louder. It was a diversion so that the real rescue team could sneak in somewhere else. How long had they been hunting for her throughout the country; how long before they had found out that she'd been chased from the Sand Village? She must have always been just a few steps ahead of them, near impossible to track in the shifting desert sand.

Another ground-shaking rumble dislodged a boulder near them. "Hurry," Sakura whispered, and as if he had heard her, Lee kicked into high gear, legs flying at a speed no normal human could achieve. His face - what she could see of it - was intent, and tinged with red. He was using one of the gates now, and his skin glowed with a vaguely demonic light.

_Demons,_ she thought tiredly, and with a strange sense of affection. _I've surrounded myself with demons. My own little harem of monsters. _

They burst back into the battlefield. Sakura's face, pressed against Lee's shoulder, was tilted downwards, so the first thing her eyes scanned was the rocky ground dotted with dark human shapes. As her friend flashed through the carnage, she caught sight of one particular form lying on it's back in the middle of the field. As Lee leapt to jump over the body, she looked down and stared into a wide, brown eye that stared blankly back. The other eye was gone, ripped away along with the other half of the corpse's head. And then the apparition was gone, swept away behind her as Lee sped on into the night. Sakura swallowed, closed her eyes briefly, and with that, Kenji's body – and betrayal – were forced out of her mind.

An instant later, she had plenty other things to think about.

Above them, red fire danced with white flame as darkness surged in between. Lee yelled something, pointing upwards, but the noise of the battle drowned him out. The demon tanuki was screaming in pure murderous delight, blasting balls of foul air at both the huge, white, two-headed dog and the enormous toad that struggled to surround it. The Kiba/Akamaru beast darted in, trying to latch teeth and claws into violently twisting demon flesh, but the creature swung a ponderous tail around to catch one of the snarling heads between the eyes. The frog took advantage of the distraction in an attempt to slice the tanuki with an enormous sword – but Shukaku merely flung the white dog into the path of the blade, and Kiba came inches away from losing one of his noses. Screams, howls, and deep-throated roars assaulted her ears, the stench of death and decay made her want to vomit, and the blaze of frighteningly inhuman chakras slamming against each other stung her eyes.

It looked like a scene from a nightmare, but she was awake, and it was real.

"Get me to Gaara," she cried desperately into Lee's ear, jabbing her hand at the flash of crimson against the tan and black demon head.

_(Someday he's going to lose himself,) _Sakura gritted her teeth as Lee leaped straight up, aiming for the stinking flesh of the sand demon. (_Someday he's going to lose himself, and when you try to reach him) _The leap carried them to the tanuki's head, and she threw herself from Lee's back, scrambling up the shifting, sandy coat. A familiar voice – Naruto - was bellowing her name and something else in panic or anger or both, but she couldn't hear the words, and couldn't stop anyway. A piece of the hard skin broke, stabbing into her calf, but she pushed past it towards the half-submerged body only a few feet away. _(and when you try to reach him)_ something came flying at her, but a blur of green knocked away the grasping black claw before she could even turn her full attention to it (_he'll rip you apart)_

"Gaara!" she screamed. "Wake up!"

Shukaku reared up, throwing her forward. She used the momentum and jumped -

and landed hard against his chest, wrapping her arms around the slumped shoulders fiercely. _Hit him!_ Inner Sakura danced with impatience and fear. _Slap him! Damnit, do **something**!_

_He looks so sad when he sleeps,_ she thought, and pressed her lips to his mouth.

His body jerked, bloodshot eyes snapping open and hands flying up to catch her arms.

"You!" He screamed into her face. She dug her hands into the back of his shirt and refused to let go. Let him try to fling her away, let him break her arms. It would hurt more to let go.

He stared at her. "_You_," he choked.

And then they were falling.


	14. The Truth In the Fairy Tale

A/N: Okay, I admit it – I'm stalling. I like all my endings, but I'm somewhat adverse to posting all of them. There are no alternate endings in life, how then can there be such in art, the point of which being to tell the truth of life? Quandary, quandary, how shalt thou be solved? And speaking of truth – time for Sakura to face a few of hers.

"Why is this child willing to go so far to save Gaara, who is not of the same village?"  
- Chiyo, Hidden Sand elder

**Chapter 13**

**The Truth of the Fairy Tale**

It was Naruto who caught them, Naruto who stood a tense guard over them as Lee tended to the exhausted Kiba and Akamaru. It was also Naruto who later wrapped her bleeding leg, as Lee guided Shikamaru and Temari to them. Shikamaru met Sakura's eyes with an assessing expression, and when met with a tired smile, he nodded once and turned to deal with his canine comrades. Temari moved towards Sakura purposefully, kneeling next to Naruto with an expression of tender concern that Sakura hadn't seen for years.

"We got our shinobi out to safety," Temari said quietly, but it was more a reassurance than a report. "Shikamaru captured a bunch of the insurgents with his shadow techniques. From what we could get out of them, they were all mostly missing nins and exiles from other countries, and the traitor promised them the wealth of the Wind country if they helped him topple it." Her voice dripped with disgust, and then became worried again. "But we'll sort it all out later. You just get some rest." Shikamaru waved her over then, and with a small smile, Temari moved to answer him.

"Naruto," Sakura whispered.

He looked up at her, smile a bit strained but still a thousand watts too bright. _I was blessed the day I met you_, she thought, but couldn't think of a way to say it without sounding horribly cheesy and cheap. She held out a hand helplessly instead. He took it, and in his eyes she saw that he understood nonetheless.

"You're welcome, Sakura-chan," he answered, patting her shoulder affectionately. "And don't worry." He winked. "Youth grants us all remarkable powers of recovery." Blue eyes flicked mischievously towards their green-clad friend. "Shh," he mock-whispered. "Don't tell Fuzzy-Brows I said that, or he'll be on me to quit ramen again and take my 'springtime' more seriously." The grin softened again as Sakura made a weak attempt to laugh, and he put a hand on her shoulder. "He'll be fine."

"I know." Sakura looked down at the tangle of red hair in her lap, and ran a few fingers delicately through the mess.

"Thank you." Gaara's voice was quiet, restrained, his eyes trained on the blond Leaf nin. The irrepressible Leaf shinobi flashed him a patented Naruto-grin. It was testimony to the degree of exhaustion he felt, though, that Gaara's fellow Jinchuuriki dropped it almost immediately, and that he winced as he forced himself to his feet a moment later, waving some medical concoction at Lee that Tsunade had sent in the very likely event that the Beautiful Green Beast used the Celestial Gates.

Sakura was left propped up against an overturned boulder on a smoldering battlefield, her clothes and body drenched in blood (most of it her own), working her hand through the hair of a demon.

She'd never felt so peaceful.

* * *

It wasn't the whistling that got to him, if you got right down to it. It wasn't the frequent sidelong glances and the knowing little smirk that accompanied them, either. Hell, it wasn't even the long, hard, slow path the shinobi took around the jagged red cliffs that guarded Sunagakure. It was the whistling _and_ the looks _and_ the grin _and_ the hot morning sun that glowered down on his tired body.

"Stop that," Gaara growled at last, managing even to muster the energy to turn his head towards the offending warbler.

Naruto grinned, shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, and shrilled one last slightly-off key note. "Whew," he said casually, as if he had not heard the command nor seen the dark glower. "Does it always get so hot this fast? Sun's not even completely clear of the horizon and I swear I'm roasting alive already. Man, I'd hate to be Kiba and his mutt right about now." He craned his neck to spot the white animal limping alongside his human partner up ahead. Akamaru was moving relatively well, but Kiba required an arm to lean on, and had been placed at the head of the party to keep his pace. Gaara and Naruto, who recovered more quickly than any of the others, plodded along near the rear.

Well, Gaara plodded – a form of motion he was rapidly learning to hate - and Naruto strolled along. He seemed to be recovering far faster than his companion.

"Well, at least Kiba could take off that heavy coat. Akamaru's kinda out of luck, there. But we won't be here too long, I bet. No offense, I'm not saying that Suna is a bad place to be," he added hastily.

Gaara felt well enough to shrug in response.

"Well, at any rate, I bet we'll head back to Konoha as soon as we're all recovered enough for the trip. And with Sakura-chan around to heal everyone, it shouldn't really take long."

The words came out blithely, but just a little too fast, as if it had been rehearsed. And Naruto's bright blue eye stayed circumspectly fixed on Gaara's face, watching for a reaction. But the red head was not the leader of his village for nothing, and his face and body stayed carefully neutral. His eyes did not flick to the side, nor did his shoulders tense or his hands clench.

Naruto's cheerful face turned thoughtful for an instant, but no one was looking, so he could risk it. "Underneath the underneath," he whispered quietly to himself.

But just to be sure, he dangled the bait again. "I'm still kinda pissed at Fuzzy Brows, though. What the hell was he thinking, carrying Sakura-chan up into that battle when she was already worn out from that healing she did on herself? Jeez." He shook his head, sending a stern look that he had mimicked from Iruka-sensei at the bowl-cut black head to the far left.

Gaara appeared not to have heard him.

Naruto nodded to himself. _In a normal person, _he heard that old perverted-hermit's voice in his head again, recalled from some lecture long ago. _In a normal person, the facial expressions and body language of someone you are questioning will often give away exactly what they feel. In a shinobi, however, the surface reactions are usually directly opposite of what they are really feeling. _

Naruto followed Gaara's disinterested stare, which seemed to be angled about twenty degrees to the left. He twisted his neck as if stretching, and directed his own eyes to roughly twenty degrees to the right. His gaze landed on a shock of pale pink hair moving slowly yet gracefully next to the determined stride of the blonde Temari. He smiled to himself, a little smug, a little sad.

The lonely sun began to climb in the empty sky.

* * *

Sakura scrubbed at her face and hands tiredly, trying to get all the blood off. _This shirt is toast,_ she decided, eyeing the rusty stains down the front. _Oh well_. Behind her, Lee and Naruto were whispering rapidly, but their voices had become too low for her to able to discern anything in the rumbling. _When did their voices change so much?_ She wondered idly. _I can't remember exactly when. I've just been so used to them for so long, I forgot how much they grew up. How much **we** grew up…_

They stopped mumbling to each other as she bent to rinse her face in the basin.

"Um, Sakura-chan?"

Naruto's voice was light but with an edge of nervousness. _Uh oh._ Sakura looked up at him, noting the tense way that Lee stood behind him. The hair on the back of her neck started to prickle, as if somewhere in her mind a warning signal had gone off. They both looked as if they would rather be out doing battle than standing there in her room - which meant whatever they were going to say, she probably wasn't going to like. _Uh oh, indeed_.

Naruto took a deep breath, in a very here-goes-nothing sort of way. "When did you know?" He scratched his head the way he always did when he was about to ask something that would probably get him smacked.

"When did I know what?" Sakura straightened, water dripping down her face onto her collar. She wiped at it with a towel, watching her normally loquacious friend hop from foot to foot and fumble for words. "Spit it out," she said at last, rolling her eyes and turning to toss the towel over the bar.

"That you…you know, cared about…or maybe that you…no, _definitely_ that you loved him. Gaara, I mean." The words tumbled out in a heap, and his cheeks colored instantly in mild embarrassment. Lee also colored, Sakura noted. So that's what all the significant looks and muttered conversations on the way back had been about.

"What makes you think that I love him?" she demanded, turning a few healthy shades of pink herself as both Naruto's words and her own sunk in.

"Well, well…" he scratched his blond head again, and she was tempted to smack him just because he seemed to expect it so much. He seemed to be caught in a permanent stutter, so Lee bravely picked up the trail.

"It's just that we saw you jump up there between him and that traitor just as we were arriving on the field, and at first we thought that..." he trailed off helplessly too, even his personal strength failing under her stare.

"That I was going to stop Gaara before he could release the Shukaku," she finished quietly.

"Well, yeah." Naruto let out a massive sigh and flopped onto her bed, eyeing her. "_I _knew he wouldn't let the demon out when he was surrounded by all his people, but I figured that maybe you only remembered how he was as a kid…" Naruto rolled onto his side and stared at her, face serious. "But you're smarter than that. And I've seen you protecting someone you cared about before."

Lee put a gentle hand on her shoulder. He was smiling, but there was a hint of sorrow in his gentle voice. "It was obvious after that. You love him."

Sakura stared blankly at the floor. This was, essentially, the exact conversation that she had forced herself not to have on the slow, sedate trip back to Sunagakare, for reasons she'd also been a little afraid to consider. It just didn't seem plausible.

Love him? Love Gaara? Love the monster that terrified her, the man that had looked her over coolly and announced that she was unfit for his company. And yet, when she'd realized what he planned to do, how Gaara planned to just _let_ that traitor bury a killing chakra into his chest in order to save his people from _himself_….

She walked unsteadily to the bedside and collapsed on the edge. Naruto moved over to make more room for her. Sakura debated ignoring the question, the accusation, but Naruto had never in his life let go of a question once he'd asked it, and though he seemed to be waiting patiently now, if she blew him off he'd just press again. She closed her eyes, frowning.

Granted, she had kissed the Sand ninja, but …well, she just hadn't wanted to hit him. _Must be the princess-wannabe in me,_ she thought wryly. _Even now on some level I believe those old fairy tales of true loves being awakened by a kiss, and then they all live happily ever after._

"I . . ." She thought of bloodshot eyes and a horrific toothy grin, of blood smeared on a sand-coated cheek and fire dancing across mad features. "It's not..." She thought of infuriating smirks and sly, cold statements that attacked her friends and the childhood ideals she had somehow never really let go. "I don't…" She thought of warm skin under her fingertips, of dark rimmed green eyes wide with a childlike confusion, and the almost tangible longing within them.

Sakura flopped backwards, sprawling on the bed.

"Oh no."

"Sakura-chan?" Naruto leaned over her, face pulled into a worried frown. "You ok?"

She sat up so fast that he fell off the bed in surprise, clonking his head solidly on the stone table. "Oh _no."_

"Sakura, what is it?" Lee moved to stand beside her instantly, concern radiating from him. "What's wrong?"

She looked down at where Naruto sat on the floor, rubbing the back of his head ruefully and looking at her with concern. _Never thought I'd see the day,_ Sakura grumbled mentally, _when **Naruto** would have to point out the obvious to **me**. _

She buried her face in her hands, not certain if she ought to burst into tears or laughter. True love? Happily Ever After? Hah! The man was a killer, and inherently distrustful of everyone and everything around him. No Prince Charming on a white horse with his sword flashing in the sunlight as he challenged the dragon to save her. His own dragons were dark, sometimes cruel, and perpetually moody. And she was not such a fool to think that she could mount her own white horse and save _him_.

_It's not fair! The day a girl realizes she's in love with someone, she's supposed to be happy, feel excited and nervous, but in the good, butterflies-in-my-stomach kind of way. That's how it felt with Sasuke…_

But he wasn't Sasuke. And what she had felt for Sasuke had, in the end, not been enough for either of them. But this…this wasn't happiness, it wasn't nervousness. It wasn't sorrow or fear – she knew what those felt like all too well to mistake anything else for them now. What was it? What did she feel like, exactly? Confused. Yes, and a little afraid. Powerful and weak all at once.

"Hey, hey, it's ok, Sakura-chan," Naruto soothed, alarmed at the tightness in her shoulders and tense fingers that covered her face. "Maybe we were wrong. It's happened before, right, Fuzzy Brows?" He glanced up at Lee tightly, knowing with a sinking feeling that whatever reassuring nonsense he might invent right now, he was not wrong.

"Forgive us," Lee murmured, sitting gingerly beside her and putting a comforting hand on shoulder. He might have said something more, but Sakura threw herself against his chest, openly weeping now. Lee shot a panicked look at Naruto, but the blond threw up his hands in defense. What did he know about women? And Sakura's tears had always been particularly difficult for him to handle.

Awkwardly, Lee put his arm around Sakura's shaking shoulders, resolved to just let her cry it out. After a moment Naruto also put a comforting hand on her head, recalling when Iruka-sensei had done that for him as a little kid.

She sobbed for a few more minutes before regaining control. "I'm sorry," she murmured, swiping at her face. Now she'd have to wash it all over again. "It's just…not something I was fully prepared to think about just yet. I'm still worn out from the Rejuvenating Jutsu and …everything." She coughed a little, and added under her breath, "Why does it always have to be the moody one?" The words came out with a peculiar little hitch at the end, as if she couldn't quite decide whether to laugh or break into fresh sobs.

"So…what now?" Naruto asked hesitantly. "I mean…now that we're all here, and we've got to go back, and, well, everything, you know?" He finished lamely.

She stared at him, face twisted in an expression he couldn't quite identify.

"Don't worry, Sakura. We'll help you figure this out," Lee said quickly, as firmly as he could. He wanted desperately to make some promise, give her some course of action that they could take. Anything to dry the tears and clear the confusion in her face. But no inspiration came to him, and he couldn't think of a single thing he could possibly do about this. Any of this.

Naruto knelt down by the bed side, putting his free hand on her knee. "It'll be ok, Sakura-chan." He shot another glance at Lee. "Won't it?" he prompted.

"Of course," Lee replied firmly. "You can count on us."

Sakura looked up at his smile, and wondered quietly how she ever could have mistaken him for some weird freak that she wanted no part of. _What a horrible, shallow child I was,_ she berated herself mildly.

She'd learned better than that, she hoped. Underneath the underneath, right?

She pulled back, smiling at Lee and Naruto, and sniffed back her tears. They were good friends. And she would be worthy of them. Firmly, she suppressed the surge of uncertainty and exhausted upset. It was time to take a break, take a deep breath, and get her bearings again.

She smiled at them, these men who had become so deeply a part of her life.

"Thank you. Thank you so much."


	15. Fear and Acceptance

A/N: So…for those wondering about Kenji and his sacrificial girl, I'm contemplating a short side story, one-shot, maybe, about who she was and where they both came from. And maybe why Kenji hated Gaara so much. Standby for that to appear. In the meantime: This is my attempt at compromising between happy ending and reality. I warn the hapless reader to make no assumptions about how this story is going to end. With that said, on with the next (but not last) chapter.

"Indeed you are skilled. Because you concealed yourself, I did not see you until it was too late."

- Uchiha Itachi

**Chapter 14**

**Fear and Acceptance**

She found him on the roof, an hour before the sun set. Her strength was returning to her fast, but she still hadn't dared to expend the chakra necessary to heal the cut on her calf, so she moved slowly, careful with her leg.

She leaned on the wall, watching him. Gaara turned his face in her direction, not looking at her but just to the left, as if something interesting just happened to be in her general direction. His expression was cool and indifferent, his eyes guarded. He was waiting for her to speak, to acknowledge him before he would deign to acknowledge her.

No, she thought, frowning. No, that wasn't exactly what he was doing. She'd thought that, when she'd first arrived. Sakura pictured that first meeting in the Kazekage's office, recalled the words and the tone and the frown that he had used against her. She'd labeled him then as condescending, as the sort of man who considered her so far beneath him that he need waste no time with courtesy or kindness. Or maybe just the sort of man incapable of either. But she saw now, with strangely clear eyes, that he looked at her not so much as an inferior but as a threat. The indifference was a shield, the cruelty a sword.

He refused to look at her not because he thought her to be inferior, but because he feared her to be superior. And all along she had thought the exact same thing, acted on exactly the same fear. She wanted to laugh at the comic irony of the strange dance they had woven around each other from needless caution. She wanted to cry at the tragic irony of realizing she loved him right when she knew she must leave him.

Sakura bit her lip, and hunted for some way to form the words she had come to say.

An interesting change, Gaara had called their stolen time together, and he was right. There were a thousand ways to explain it, really. An idle pastime. An attempt to drive away the loneliness. Just another routine into which she had fallen. But whatever it was, she didn't for a moment pretend to understand it. He was Gaara of the Desert, and for all his improvement in the art of being human, he did not fall in love. He was not a prince in a fairy tale. She was not a princess. And no matter what Kenji might have said, or what conclusions he might have drawn, or even what illusions she might allow herself to harbor, she did not have a hold on him.

But somehow, someway, he had created a hold over her.

_I'm leaving,_ she thought, and opened her mouth to confirm it aloud.

"I was wrong," Gaara said abruptly, his voice cutting through the quiet and startling her.

She blinked in surprise, and then mentally slapped her forehead. _Predictably unpredictable. Forgot about that for a second. _Aware that her mouth was still hanging open, she collected her wits and snapped it shut. No sense in looking like a fool, no matter how much she felt like one.

He seemed mildly agitated, as if there was something on his mind as well and he didn't like it. She knew the feeling. Taking a controlled breath, she tried to say it again, to commit to the facts she needed to state. _I'm leaving, I'm going home, and nothing can ever come of any of this._

"I was wrong." He managed to cut her off again, as if he somehow knew what she was trying to say and was deliberately preventing her from saying it. "To think of you like I did," he elaborated at last, and his voice was flat again, emotionless. Retreating into the familiarity of apathy, she recognized. Instantly, the speech she had so painfully prepared and memorized flew right out of her head, and a surge of something that wasn't anger or mockery took its place. Something…solid, confident. Whatever it was, it made her stand up straight and take a step towards the defiantly stoic figure standing with her in the dark.

_Oh, no, you don't._

"You mean you were wrong to think I was a traitor?" Sakura demanded bluntly, but with no malice in her voice. He tilted his head a little, still not really looking at her. Alright, if he wasn't going to look at her of his own will, then she would just have to force him to do so.

She moved closer, sliding between him and the wall at the edge of the building. "Or do you mean that you were wrong to believe that I was lying to you based on nothing but the word of a one chuunin?" Her eyes stayed locked on his, unwavering even when he shifted his weight dangerously. Her voice was low and oddly melodic, the charmer's song that held the poisonous cobra in thrall.

"Or do you mean you were wrong to think that leaving me in the desert would actually kill me?"

Gaara stared at her, though if it was her words or her sudden proximity that made his breathing hitch, she couldn't tell. "Because, yes, you _were_ wrong." She jabbed a finger gently into his chest. "On all those counts. And just so you know, the Fifth did technically ask me to study you, but she only requested it as sort of a side note to my actual mission. I think she only wanted me to talk to you once or twice so I could give her a general opinion of you." She shook her head, and traced a finger along his jaw line, watching the way his nostrils flared, his eyes widened marginally.

"Once or twice?" His voice was low and deceptively flat again, but she caught the other question underneath nonetheless.

"After that first time on the roof, I considered my task accomplished. All those times I came back after that…It wasn't a mission. It may have sort of started as one, but in the end it became…" Sakura trailed off lamely, realizing with a stomach-churning lurch how close she'd come to blurting out the truth that she had been determined to hide from him.

She couldn't do it, couldn't say it. She hadn't come here to say it, but somehow she'd found herself trying to admit to something she neither wanted to admit, nor should she. _It hardly matters what I should or shouldn't say,_ she thought privately. _I'm too much of a coward to say it anyway. _She'd done that before, put herself on the line before, and look where _that_ had landed her.

His fingers grazed her neck, and her brain stopped working properly.

"What did it become?" Gaara asked, very quietly. She was suddenly aware that he had stepped forward, slightly, that the distance between them was perfunctory at best. She could feel his body heat – she could feel…him, brushing ever so lightly against her. And his fingers hovered over her throat, up to the delicate curve of her jaw, to the sensitive skin at the corner of her eye.

What was he really thinking? Sakura tried to open her senses as Tsunade had taught, tried to feel something in his aura. There was a muffled sensation around him, as if he was deliberately holding some strong emotion back, shielding himself.

She swallowed, and watched his eyes shift to regard her throat, then back up to her face. Waiting.

"What did it become," she finally whispered, "to you?"

He blinked, confused for a moment. And then that smirk rose to his face again, but there was no cruelty in it tonight. "I don't know what it's called. But I hate it and I want it, all at the same time. It makes me feel weaker." He narrowed his eyes briefly, then sighed a little and let the anger go. "But it will not go away. And sometimes, it makes me feel stronger. I fear it and I want it."

"What do you fear?" she asked. "What do you want?"

The smirk switched to a frown instantly as Gaara slide his hand flush against her face, pushing strong fingers into her hair. His other hand rose and settled on her shoulder, as if he expected her to run off and he was holding her there. No, as if he _feared_ she would run, and he was confirming to himself that she hadn't already.

"You," he said at last, and there was fragility in the statement. He had abandoned caution, and he knew it. He didn't like it much either, judging by the set of his jaw and the tension in his body. It disturbed him. Left him vulnerable. If ever she wanted to crush him, to end the emotional dance she had somehow initiated with him, all it would take would be one word, one sentence.

She didn't want that.

Still moving carefully, slowly, because some things had not changed and would _not _change for a long time between them, she stood on her toes, ignoring her protesting calf. And because some things _had_ changed, she kissed him.


	16. What Remains

**A/N EDIT: **To those who are coming here because they got an alert saying this story has a new chapter, the new chapter is in the middle. Please see chapter 9. Thanks, and sorry for the confusion!

A/N: Recieved a few comments that said my last chapter left the reader feeling a little incomplete. So, for your enjoyment, I present this wee blurb. Not entirely sure I like it. Come to think of it, not entirely sure I like this entire story too much at all. It may undergo some serious editing eventually - when life slows down enough to allow the proper amount of time a total overhaul requires. At any rate, for now, this is it. The final huzzah.

"Next time you see me, I'll be more than just an obstacle."  
-Haruno Sakura

**Epilogue**

Sakura stared at her mirror. _What the hell is **that**_? She rubbed her forehead stiffly, but it didn't come off. _I swear I washed my face. How did I miss…?_

"I doubt that will work," a low voice growled behind her, hot breath tickling the little hairs on the back of her neck. She leaned back, letting her finger drop away from her face as he slid his hands around her waist, holding her against him. His arms were still tense, hesitant. He wasn't sure if she would try to pull away; he wasn't sure he would let her if she did. She swallowed the tiny thrill of nerves in her gut and leaned back slightly, waiting patiently for him to relax.

"I thought I'd gotten something stuck on my face," she told him, frowning at the mirror. "But it looks like it's in the epidermis."

"It was there when you woke me," Gaara answered, and in the mirror she saw that he was strangely preoccupied with staring at the curve of her shoulder where the shirt pulled away to reveal skin.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked quickly, to cover the heat that rushed into her face.

He shrugged against her back. "It didn't seem important at the time."

She sighed and turned in his arms, away from the mirror. He almost flinched in surprise, but managed to stop the motion. She smiled sweetly, but her eyebrow quirked up just a fraction. Gaara scowled. "It looks like the Hokage's mark," he said, managing to keep the grumpy note in his voice to a minimum.

Sakura furrowed her brow experimentally, but she couldn't feel the tiny green mark that had somehow surfaced on her skin. It was miniscule, but very distinct. He was right; it was similar to the mark on Tsunade-sensei's forehead. "Rejuvenation Jutsu," she murmured, reaching to rub it with a fingertip again. "Guess that's a side effect of focusing that much chakra in one place."

Gaara wrapped a hand around her wrist. "You can't rub it off, then. Stop that."

She laughed softly. "Oh well," she muttered as he dropped her wrist. She let her newly freed hand come to rest, tentatively, on his shoulder, secretly marveling that he was allowing her the liberty of touching him so familiarly. She traced her fingers along the leather strap that held his gourd of sand to his back experimentally. "I'm not really into tattoos, but it was worth it this time."

Without warning, Gaara's arms suddenly tightened. His hands dug into her back, his elbows locked down on her rib cage, restricting her breathing a little. "That was stupid," he said, and a dangerous edge sharpened his voice. She forced her breathing to shallow out, to stay slow. _I'm never going to get used to the mood swings_, Sakura lamented inwardly as she fought to keep her face and voice calm. _Like walking on a narrow ledge,_ she thought sardonically. _And this is just another change in the wind._

But she was learning to be an excellent balancer.

"I've done plenty of stupid things lately, I'm sure." Sakura smiled cheerfully. "Which one specifically do you mean?"

"I was planning on using the sand to catch him," he told her in a monotone, but his face was edgy, his body tense. "The impenetrable shield. I was going to wrap it around him just before he hit me."

She considered this. "You can do that?"

He nodded once, curtly.

"That killing-chakra came from a human blood sacrifice," she frowned back at him. "It probably could have cut through."

"But it would have held him long enough for me to dodge the blow, and then I might have been able to crush him."

Sakura lifted her eyebrows. "Might?"

"It was a better plan than yours." Gaara snarled, lowering his chin and causing locks of red hair to fall forward over his forehead. "You had nothing." His hand pushed roughly from the small of her back to the nape of her neck. His fingers tightened but didn't quite clench in her hair; just enough pressure to pull her head back, expose her throat. "You're too easy to kill." The words were almost accusatory, as if she were somehow trying to cheat him out of something.

_He'll rip you apart,_ Kenji murmured in the echoes of her memory, and laughed. Inner Sakura stamped on the twisted memory viciously. _You keep out of this, asshole._

"Not _that_ easy," she shot back, glancing upwards to emphasize her point. His eyes flicked to the new mark on her forehead, and the fingers at her neck loosened, became gentle, caressing.

Sakura purred inwardly as they combed deftly over the back of her scalp, down the soft skin to the base of her neck. "No," he agreed, attention sliding lower. He bent his head to press his lips softly over the skin at the hollow of her still-exposed throat. There was a kind of uncertainty in the movement, as if he didn't really know what he was doing. But he knew what he wanted, and if Gaara of the Desert had learned anything in his life, it was to never balk at getting what he wanted.

She held very still as his lips moved on, growing more confident as he felt her heart speed up, her stomach tighten with something that was not entirely fear. She held still, reminding herself to breath, and feeling the shivery rush of heat race down her spine and into the pit of her belly. Through the material of his shirt, she could feel his own heart speed up to match hers, and the heat on her neck became more demanding, more urgent. She was caught in the circle of his arms, caught in the snare that she had willfully made for herself.

"I warned you," he said quietly against her ear.

"Warned me?" she breathed, brushing her thigh against his leg lightly, daring to tease him.

Gaara reached down and caught her knee, pulling the leg back up over his thigh and pinning it there effortlessly. "The first night. I told you it's impossible to know what you were getting into." He looked down at her, smirking. "Until you were trapped."

Sakura thought back to that encounter…how long ago? Lifetimes. "That isn't exactly what you said," she replied. "You just said that you had to experience something to understand it."

"I _said,"_ he retorted, hand sliding up her thigh in a very distracting way. "That you couldn't know what something was like until it was too late to back away from it."

"I don't see the difference," she muttered, looking at her hand resting on his chest. And then his underlying meaning finally hit her. "Wait…you were _warning_ me? About you?"

He caught her chin with his free hand and forced her to look him in the eye. "What do you _think_ I was talking about?"

"I thought you were just. . .talking, that night," she fumbled. "I thought I annoyed you."

"You did," he told her calmly, ignoring the frown she shot him. "That's why I wanted to warn you. No one talks to me like that, because no one wishes to create an association with me beyond anonymous business aquaintance. No one annoys me, because no one dares." He leaned his head down to look her right in the eye. "You dared. It got my attention. My attention can be a bad thing."

The warning again, she realized. He's repeating it now. He hadn't changed, and in a variety of ways he never would. She saw wild green eyes, blood smeared on one cheek. She saw a bloody lump that had once been a man. She saw a wall of sand rising to crush his terrified enemies. She saw the pain of betrayal, and heard the choked cry – "_You_" - as the demon body vanished out from under her. He was so alien to everything she had ever known, so completely different from everything she had ever wanted – and somehow, the embodiment of all those same things.

_Choices, and change_, she thought with a touch of humor that felt very out of place with the rest of her emotions. Since the day she had left Konoha, her life had been all about choices, and the changes that resulted. "I have to go back to Konoha," she said quietly. "I have to request permission to leave the village."

"You have to apply to take the trials in Suna," he replied matter-of-factly, sounding for the moment more like an administrator than a shinobi. "You have to prove to the council that you are capable and trustworthy."

"I want to be able to go back sometimes," she told him seriously. "I still have family, and friends."

He nodded. "Will you miss them?"

"So much," she whispered, and felt a little surge of fear at the thought of leaving them behind. His face tightened into an uncomfortable – and possibly angry – frown, and he pulled back from her a little. She sighed, and clasped her hands behind him to prevent him from pulling further away. "But it's not like I'm cutting myself off from them. Nor they from me. You'll be getting a lot more diplomatic visits, I bet." She flashed him a grin. "The future Sixth Hokage will probably be around a lot more than you might be ready to handle, for one thing."

He stared at her, not smiling. She felt the edges of her own grin fade a bit in the face of his frown. Had she said something wrong? Just as she was about to apologize, he leaned forward and kissed her very hard.

"Wha…?" She took a deep breath to get air back into her lungs and brain. "What was that?"

Gaara raised an eyebrow at her. "I did that right," he stated.

She considered telling him he hadn't, just to wipe that calm, self-confident look off his face, but she really wasn't much of a liar. She nodded instead.

He nodded in return. "I thought so."

Infuriating man. Strange man. Difficult, dangerous man. He would make her life confusing, unstable, perpetually off-kilter, and possibly a whole lot shorter than it might have been otherwise.

But it would certainly be interesting, no matter how long it lasted.

Sakura put her arm resolutely around his back, the other hand sliding down the muscles of his torso to slip under the edge of the shirt. She traced his ribs with her fingertips, kissing the skin just under his ear. He froze, a slight shudder running through him. _Hmm,_ she mused at the reaction, eyeing the spot_. Duly noted_.

"Do _that_," he rasped suddenly against her cheek, "and the desert will never get another chance at you again." It was a form of endearment, but it was a threat too, and she knew it. And under the promise and the threat, it was a plea, an offer to give her one last chance. She could push away now, run from him now and he might not chase her. She could brush herself off, go back to the familiarity of her life before she had thrown herself into the ever-shifting sandstorm of his world.

Sakura took a deep breath, letting her lungs push against the vise of his arms. He loosened them slightly in response, letting her breathe. When she opened her eyes again, there was no hesitation, no doubt, and no fear in the green depths.

She smiled. "I know."


End file.
